Invisible

‘What?’

‘Head,’ she repeats, and her hand falls onto his hair to guide his stoop under the car’s roof.

Charlotte’s car smells of her perfume and warmed plastic and crackers. His hand, sweeping the seat around his thighs, finds some sharp flat crumbs and a cellophane wrapper. ‘This is the same old heap, isn’t it? The Citroën?’ he asks as Charlotte inserts the ignition key.

‘Don’t be rude, Edward. It’s a reliable car, and it’s friendly.’

‘Done sixty in it yet?’

‘Would you like to walk? That can be arranged.’

‘No, but it’s about time this thing was put out of its misery. It must have half a million miles on the clock by now.’

‘Exactly. It’s reliable. And I can’t afford a new one.’

‘But –’

‘Shut up, Edward. Zip it.’ The car begins to turn.

‘Hold it,’ he shouts, putting up a hand. ‘One last thing before we set off.’

‘What?’ she snaps, braking.

‘Does this place seem familiar to you at all?’

‘What? This hotel?’

‘Yes. I thought we might have been here once, when we were kids.’

‘When?’

‘You would have been around seven. I seem to see a picnic and a big building with a garden in front of it. I thought it might be this one.’

‘Afraid not.’

‘You sure? Have a look.’

‘I’ve had a look.’

‘Have another. Just a quick one. A quick little peek.’

The car moves off at walking pace. ‘Nope,’ she states.

‘Not in the slightest bit familiar?’

‘Never seen it before.’

‘Positive?’

‘Bleeding hell, Edward. Positive.’

‘A false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain.’

‘What?’

‘Shakespeare.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It’s OK. Doesn’t matter.’

‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Edward. Don’t criticise my car and don’t be a smart-arse.’

‘OK. Fair enough. Onward,’ he declares, smacking the dashboard. He opens the window and puts his face into the rushing air.

‘Big kid,’ Charlotte mutters, patting his knee playfully, but she sees nothing playful in the expression that is fixed on her brother’s face: rather, there is anger in the furrows above his eyes, as if she has let him down by not giving him the answer he wanted. She gives him her news about the children, about Lucy’s prize for gymnastics and Sarah’s school trip to Wales. Simon might be in line for promotion, she tells him; her job at head office might be axed, though, and then she’d be back at the Gloucester branch. Edward smiles, nods his head, frowns concernedly, but he is thinking of something else. He seems to have decided that today will not be easy, but she can never tell any more what he’s thinking. It used to be like looking into a darkened cage, looking into his face. In his room, at his desk, he would put down the big lens and wince at her under the glaring light, straining to see. Now he has closed his eyes; he has the appearance of looking inward, making up his mind about something. ‘Try to be patient with Mum,’ she says, and he nods and puts his face back into the rushing air.

In the garden, sitting in the high-backed chair, he is as grim as a judge. Grasping the arms of the chair he tells her: ‘I might go. I might not go. There’s no point getting into a state when she hasn’t even got the job yet.’

‘But I worry, Edward.’

‘As do we all, Ma.’

‘How you’ll cope, I mean.’

‘It’s Italy, not the Siberian tundra. It’s really quite civilised. I’ll cope there the same way I cope here, if I go.’

‘I don’t know, Edward. I saw a story in the paper. Some American boy was kidnapped.’

‘Where, Mum? Where was this?’ Edward demands, almost shouting.

‘In the papers.’

‘Yes, I gathered that. But where in Italy?’

‘Somewhere, Edward. I don’t know. It was awful. Cut off his ear, they did.’

‘Believe me, I am not going to be kidnapped.’

‘Rome, I think it was. Or Naples.’

‘Naples,’ their father confirms.

‘Miles and miles and miles away, Mum. Another country. And I bet your American boy was the heir to a fortune. Not a random impecunious foreigner.’

‘I don’t know, Edward, but it was horrible.’

‘What a catch I’d be. One disabled translator. Any reasonable sum accepted. No cheques. Will consider part exchange. It’s not going to happen, is it? Be sensible, Mum.’

‘He’s right, Mary,’ says their father.

Their mother makes a gesture of woebegone appeal to her husband, miming his name. Looking wearily at Edward, she tallies the beads of her necklace. ‘But it’s a big step,’ she says, passing him another sandwich. ‘You have to think carefully.’

‘Believe it or not, Mum, that’s what I’m doing.’

‘It can so easily go wrong.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Edward moans, putting the sandwich down before he has taken a bite. ‘Here we go. This is the intro to Ethel, isn’t it? Ethel going bonkers in Winnipeg.’

‘You shouldn’t make fun, Edward. She had a shocking time, she did. Thought she’d be all right, but she needed her friends and her family more than she thought.’

‘Enough, please,’ Edward interrupts. ‘So Ethel went to Canada and became an abandoned wife with a brood of uncontrollable brats and a vicious addiction to sleeping tablets. From this you deduce not that an excitable young woman would be ill-advised, on the basis of a two-week romance, to follow a feckless womanising boozer to a godforsaken dump in the middle of a zillion acres of wheat, but that separation from the home soil brings inevitable ruin to any Brit. It doesn’t follow, Mum, so spare me the heart-rending tale of hapless Ethel and her Canadian purgatory. She is not germane to the case,’ he pronounces, using his words to push her away, and so she never says what she means to say, and what Edward knows she means to say, which is simply that she will miss him if he goes away, and is afraid that she might never see him again. ‘So, Mum, what’s been happening, then?’ he asks when he has finished the sandwich, but there isn’t much to say, because of course nothing much has been happening. They are nearing their seventies; they don’t go out very often; their friends have started to die. Edward knows this, but still he asks that stupid question, as if he were talking to a friend down the pub. If he could only see how he looks, she thinks. If he could only see their mother’s helpless face.

‘You all right there?’ his father asks him. Assured that Edward is content to bask in the sun and listen for a while, he excuses himself for a minute or two, to go to the bathroom. Ten minutes later, declining her help, Edward goes to find him.

Following the hum and whine, Edward climbs the stairs. He knocks and opens the door, as a chisel shrieks on spinning wood. ‘Is it safe?’ he shouts. ‘May I come in?’

The lathe winds down with a slumping sound. ‘Hello, son,’ says his father, as though Edward still lived at home and had casually wandered into the room. ‘Careful there,’ he says, as his toe comes into contact with the foot of the bench, but he stays where he is. ‘Clear on your right. Chair just beside you.’

‘So this is the shed?’ he asks, moving crabwise across the hardboard floor until he touches the chair. ‘That’s it.’

‘You’ve got the bench set up, then?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Must be really popular with the neighbours,’ he says, and his father makes a soft snorting sound that may signify a smile. ‘What are you making?’

‘A stool. A footstool. For your mother,’ says his father, putting a piece of wood into his hand. ‘That’s a leg for it.’ The leg has a cube at each end and is ringed with deep grooves which are warm and furred with fine shavings. ‘The ankles need a rest,’ his father explains, taking it back. ‘Not as nimble as she was.’ The lathe restarts; the dab of the cutting tool raises a cry and a whiff of hot wood.

Perceiving a difference between the sound on his left and on his right, he advances a hand across the wall. His hand encounters a low shelf, and another above it, and a third. ‘What’s here?’ he asks.

‘Hm?’ responds his father, though he heard the question.

‘Is this your pots and stuff?’

‘The cars,’ his father tells him.

Walking his fingers along a shelf, he locates one of the model cars. ‘I’ll be careful,’ he says, supporting the car on his flattened hand. He can feel the ridge of the exhaust pipe on his palm. ‘What’s this one?’ he asks.

‘Hm?’

‘What’s this one?’

‘A Bugatti. Show me? T55 Coupé.’

With his index finger he circles the spare wheel on the outside of the boot. He sweeps the wave-like running board, taps the conical headlamps, but he cannot remember anything of the Bugatti T55. His father’s models used to be kept in a mighty cabinet in the dining room, a cabinet of open decks, like a miniature multi-storey car park, painted white. He remembers a section reserved for illustrious older marques: a silver Auto Union car was there, with a scarlet Maserati and a green Vanwall. Concentrating on the name, he recovers the shape of the Vanwall, its thick blade of a body and the cockpit lodged behind the elongated bonnet, and, from this, momentarily, occurs an evanescent bloom of the Vanwall car’s deep green.

‘So, son,’ says his father, fitting another piece of wood to the lathe. ‘They keeping you busy?’ he asks, as if his translations were the benefaction of some charitable committee.

‘I’ve plenty of work, Dad, yes.’

‘Articles and stuff?’

‘That type of thing. Bits and pieces. I’ve a bigger project starting soon,’ he says, meaning the Stadler book, then it occurs to him that he has another book in progress, which it has never seemed appropriate to mention. He waits for another question, but none follows. ‘It should arrive next week.’

‘Good,’ says his father.

‘A book about someone called Jochen Stadler. A German chap. He went to South America as a missionary, then became an anthropologist-ecologist. He lived in the forest for years, in the Amazon, and married a girl who had looked after him when he was ill. When his wife died he came back to Germany, to his home town, and became a professor at the university, and a politician. His father had been a member of Göring’s staff,’ he perseveres. ‘A forester. Looking after bison in a Polish forest, until the partisans shot him.’

‘Had enough of the Nazis by now, I’d have thought.’

‘Not quite yet, Dad. Nazis, cooking and gardening – the three guaranteed sellers. Eva Braun’s Kitchen Garden would be a sure-fire hit,’ he jokes, but neither he nor his father laughs. His father is taking a tool from a rack; he hears the slither of steel on oiled stone.

‘Hotel’s OK?’ his father asks.

‘It’s fine. Very comfortable.’

Rhythmically the steel grinds against the slickened stone. ‘Your mother can’t see why you’re not staying here,’ his father remarks. ‘She’s put out, you know.’

‘But there’s no space, is there, Dad? Unless I’ve missed a room somewhere.’

‘As far as she’s concerned there’s plenty of space.’

‘And where would that be?’

‘I’m not arguing with you. Just telling you what she thinks.’

‘And I’ve work to do. There’s nowhere I could work.’

‘She thinks there is. Charlotte’s room.’

‘Dad, there’s not even a table in Charlotte’s room.’

‘The living room, then.’

‘It has to be quiet for me to work. I’m fussy. I’m easily aggravated by noise. Honestly, it’s better for everyone if I stay where I am.’

‘You know best, son, I’m sure,’ his father concludes, as the lathe begins to spin once more.

Exploring again the curves and details of the model car, he recalls how, late in the evening, before going to bed, he would go down into the cellar of the old house, where his father would be working. He would walk towards the ball of light and his father would take his hand to guide him to the stool. A sheet of wallpaper, reversed, always covered the bench, and on one part of the paper the husk of the car’s body would be laid. The metallic pieces for the chassis and engine were arrayed around it. Some were so small, like rat’s bones, he had to lower his nose to the paper to see them. His father used needle-thin screwdrivers and delicate little knives and drills that he turned between his finger and thumb. Sometimes it made him think of the hospital, and he would secretly become upset. He liked the names: Studebaker, Hispano-Suiza, Mercedes-Benz, Panhard-Levasseur. They connoted ingenuity and high craftsmanship, and he always enjoyed listening to his father as he worked, extolling a beautiful Ferrari engine, or the functional purity of the 2CV, which could seat two farmers with their hats on, and transport them and their pig over a rutted road, and was so simple a machine that the local blacksmith could repair it, should it ever break down, which it hardly ever would. Through his father’s words he came to share something of his admiration for these cars and their creators, but things changed as his eyesight worsened and it gave him pain to use the immense lens that his father used. So in the evenings he would go to Charlotte’s room and she would read the pages he had to study for homework, while his father worked for hours in the cellar, assembling his little cars. They won prizes, his father’s cars, at events they used to attend together, in high-ceilinged buildings with rough wooden floors and toilets outside. Then one year there was an exhibition, in Bristol, to which his father went without him. Sitting in the living room, with the TV on, they all agreed that it was best if he stayed at home. His mother stroked his hair while his father was speaking, but by then he was beginning to find his father’s hobby ridiculous, which perhaps his parents knew. When this was, exactly, he cannot remember. He must have been thirteen or so, around the time that he became ‘son’ rather than ‘Edward’.

His father’s appearance in his mind, the last image of him before he became a ghost with his father’s voice, comes from around this time as well. Concentrating, he can see a white shirt and broad brown tie, and an unfocused face with wide sideburns and a drooping moustache. He remembers him smoking a cigarette at his desk, waving an arm as he talked to his secretary, who brought tea for them all. One wall of the office was glazed, and the cars in the showroom on the other side made a pattern of soft rectangles, like an abstract design in stained glass. And his mother: he sees her wearing a yellow jumper, and he can make out her soft, lineless skin and her eyes, which are surprised-looking and very dark. Her feet now drag when she crosses the room, and her cup chatters against the saucer when she sets it down, but her face when he thinks of her is this one, a face that is dissolving year by year but never ageing, fading on the brink of middle age, where she will stay until she dies.

‘I’ll let you get on,’ he says.

‘OK, son,’ his father replies, stopping the lathe.

After the evening meal they all go into the living room, for a film-length episode of his parents’ favourite programme. He sits beside his mother on the new settee, which is too large for the room, so whenever anyone opens the door it bangs against the thickly padded arm. There is a new television, which would seem to be as wide as an armchair. The room still bears a smell of new carpet and wallpaper paste and emulsion. Nothing has any familiarity, other than the cushions with the brocade borders. For his benefit his mother provides a commentary on the action. ‘Another body,’ she tells him, at a doomy chord. ‘Killed like the first one – bag over her head.’ Feet sprint heavily on waterlogged grit: ‘Someone’s up to something in the alley.’ From time to time she puts a hand on his; he can sense her turning from the screen to his face. He is waiting for the programme to end, for Charlotte to take him back to the hotel, and he feels ashamed at his irritation with the cadence he hears so often in his mother’s voice, his impatience with her pity for him and for herself. Only by talking can he resist the oppression of her pity, but there is little he can talk to her about, other than the possibility of his leaving the country. He is ashamed of betraying what he thought of his father’s childish hobby, if he did betray what he thought of it. And now he finds himself thinking of the day he left home, the day his father took him to the hall of residence. On the steps they embraced. His father clapped him on the shoulders, then drew him close. Now they shake hands, that’s all.

‘Someone’s following the policewoman,’ his mother tells him.

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘It’ll be her boyfriend. It’s bound to be. Remember what she said to him, in the pub, when he –’

‘Don’t spoil it,’ she says, taking his hand. The policewoman reaches her car before the stalker can strike; jingly music begins, like synthesised wind-chimes. ‘You’ll visit us again, soon?’ his mother asks.

‘Of course,’ he says, and she squeezes his hand so tightly that the trembling in her fingers stops.

Malcolm looks into the bar, where a young woman in a rhinestone tiara is sitting amidst a dozen friends. On the other side of the room a smartly dressed young man sits in the attitude of Rodin’s Thinker, possibly asleep, with a mobile phone on his knee, and two women who may be sisters are tearfully hugging each other. He withdraws to the garden and strolls for a while, before resting on the bench by the night-scented stock. The weather will break tonight: the air is damp and inert, and a greenish tinge is seeping into the sky on the horizon. A canopy of cloud is sliding forward slowly over the hill, occluding the stars. The trees are motionless for now, but soon they will begin to stir, and then the rain will come. Watching the fans of light rising and falling on the bypass, he breathes the perfume of night-scented stock. Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after, he will speak to Stephanie. He presses a hand against the pocket in which he carries her letter. The leaves are so still it’s as though the garden were encased in glass.

A taxi draws up and he looks back over his shoulder. The young woman with the tiara is standing at the window of the bar, and at the sight of her he experiences a sudden upswelling of happiness, an ambivalent happiness, which vanishes almost at once. He looks at the sky, then again at the hotel, and immediately he understands: what he had seen when he glanced at the windows of the Oak was a vision of the Zetland, at night, when the windows would blaze gold against the sky. Crouching under the sill, he would peer into the smoky room, marvelling at the bottles that were ranged on the glass shelves behind the bar. Indescribable tastes must come out of these bottles, he used to think, because their colours were so extraordinary: a fragile butterfly blue, a radiant amber, a green like new leaves. He would wait, kneeling by the gutter of the terrace, and sometimes his father would appear, setting things right, exchanging a word with a member of his staff. They were like the crew of a ship, each with his role to perform, and the Zetland did resemble a ship, when you looked at it from below the road, especially when it was dark and the mist had risen, and the turret looked like the bridge of a liner, with the slender flagpole on its roof, half hidden in the mist, as though it were emerging from a fog-bank. Sitting on the bench, he gives himself up to his memory of his father’s hotel, to the image of the buildings of Saltburn’s seafront as it appeared from the pier, with the flat spools of foam unwinding on the black water below his feet. The beach was clammy under the light of the moon and the far-off street lamps, and he would stare to find the place where the sand blended into the water, or the seam where the sky became the coal-coloured sea. Some nights, looking out to sea, he could not tell which lights were stars and which were tankers, and the lights of the Zetland were almost extinguished by the mist that flowed around its windows. Before going home to prepare his father’s meal, he might stop at the terrace steps, lured by the burnished interiors of the hotel. Hunched on the terrace, he would gaze at the glossy wooden panels of the walls, at the lift’s dark veneered doors, at the wide stone fireplace of the lounge, at the waitresses who carried tureens and covered dishes as big as rugby balls to a dining room that had a Turkish carpet and a chandelier like a bush of ice hung upside down. Often, when he glimpsed his father moving purposefully across the foyer, alone, like a ship’s captain making sure that all was in order, he would try to imagine how it would be to follow his father around the building, becoming familiar with every room and corridor of it, learning how the Zetland worked. It would be better than any other job he could do, helping to run a building that existed only to give pleasure, a place to which people would return year after year in the certainty of being happy there. Everything seemed well made in the Zetland – there was that as well, and the sense that something of the town’s history was kept alive there, while everything around it changed at a faster speed. But now the Zetland has become apartments and the station is used only by a two-carriage train that shuttles along the coast to Darlington, where Stephenson’s Locomotion stands like a dinosaur in the museum.

The roar of tyres on the gravel eradicates his reminiscence. Headlight beams swing across the grass in front of him and splay against the hotel’s façade. He sees Mr Morton get out of the car, smack the roof, and remain standing where he’s been left.

‘Mr Morton, good evening,’ he calls, crossing the lawn.

‘Mr Caldecott,’ Mr Morton replies pleasantly, raising a hand to give an incomplete wave.

‘Going in?’

‘Presently, yes,’ says Mr Morton, turning away again.

‘I’m sorry. I thought – Shall I leave you be?’

‘No, no. Please don’t. Just taking a last dose of country air,’ Mr Morton explains, with an appreciative sniff.

‘Same here,’ he says. ‘It’s been a fine day, hasn’t it?’

‘It has,’ Mr Morton distractedly agrees.

‘The storm is on its way, I think,’ he remarks. ‘A day behind schedule.’

‘I think so. Yes. The air’s very thick tonight.’

‘It is. Very heavy.’

Mr Morton raises his face, smiling slightly, as if the moonlight felt as good as sunlight on his skin, and then he yawns. ‘I do apologise. It’s been a long day. An early start.’

‘Yes. I’d hoped to catch you after breakfast, but you were leaving as I arrived.’

‘My sister’s clock runs on medieval time. Her day starts at sunrise.’

‘Ah, your sister. I see. I had wondered. Sister or cousin, I thought. There’s a resemblance.’

‘Poor girl.’

‘So your visit to the Oak –?’

‘Filial duty, partly,’ Mr Morton replies, addressing the earth at his feet. ‘A family reunion.’

‘I see, I see.’

Another taxi is coming up the drive; Mr Morton turns to track its progress to the porch. ‘Rarely satisfactory, family gatherings, don’t you find?’

‘I don’t think I’m in a position to comment.’

‘You have no family?’ he asks bluntly.

‘Not much of one. The parents have long gone. An aunt in Rhyl. That’s all for the older generation.’

‘And are you married, Mr Caldecott?’

‘Not any more.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘Quite all right. I’m thoroughly divorced. And you?’

‘No wife. Father, mother, sister, a phalanx of aunts and uncles, but no wife.’

‘I see,’ he says. They stand a yard apart, both facing the portentous expanse of slate-green cloud, as though they were awaiting together the appearance of something in the sky. ‘Is the room to your liking?’

‘Very comfortable,’ says Mr Morton.

‘Good.’

‘Positively sumptuous.’

‘Good.’

Mr Morton takes a deep, relishing breath. ‘Very tranquil here,’ he observes.

‘It used to be quieter.’

‘Yes?’

‘Before the bypass was cut. When I first came here you could hear owls across the valley. Not any more.’

‘Believe me, this is tranquil compared with where I live,’ says Mr Morton, and no sooner has he said it than the tiara girl and three of her friends come out of the hotel, laughing raucously. He smiles towards the porch, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Goodnight, Mr Caldecott.’