The Ash Burner Page 5

  She glanced up from her sketchpad. ‘Aren’t you listening?’

  Later, after class when the ladies went upstairs to the balcony bar of the surf club for a white wine, Anthony joined us on the beach. Claire and I were talking. He pulled out his journal so that he could make his own drawings, and sat a little behind us, away to the side.

  ‘Are you going to show us?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t you see I’m deliberately not interrupting you,’ he joked in reply. ‘Leave me in peace!’

  Claire had been talking to me about Anthony when he arrived; maybe he’d sensed it and for that reason stayed back. She’d said that I made him happier, and made her feel better about him, more relaxed. She and Anthony had once sat on the end of my hospital bed and demanded answers from me. Now, as suddenly, they seemed to want me there to hold them closer together, rather as the isthmus held the two beaches behind the Head – even if our talk was most often about getting away.

  That evening, I shared with my father new theories about art and the possibility of meaningful escape. Maybe that was a mistake, for I knew that at the heart of his exile from England lay an impossible, failed one.

  But he replied that there was something to what we said. The best minds searched for what they didn’t know and hadn’t experienced, because so much else was entertainment. We didn’t need any more of that, he thought. But he added this: you usually find what you most need right in front of you.

  ‘What about the spirit?’ I asked. ‘What about if the soul wants more?’ I was ready to quote Anthony on this. ‘Don’t you think sometimes we’re drawn to things we don’t understand, but that we need? Isn’t that why it’s important to leave?’

  He replied, ‘Don’t you think the soul is perfectly measured by the people we love? I think if you don’t find the spirit reflected there, you’re going about love the wrong way.’

  Yes. But there was magic in flight, too – in the unreachable.

  ‘Why do you want magic?’ he said. ‘Are you in love?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  He wanted to tease me out of my seriousness. He put his hand on my forehead and looked at me closely. A medical examination. But I was determined to be stubborn, and I didn’t return his stare. He went on, ‘I’ve read that falling in love feels like magic, or chaos, for some people. I think they must be mad. Or they’re reading the wrong poets.’

  ‘You think poets are the reason people go mad? Wasn’t that how you felt about Mum?’

  He’d taken his hand from my forehead. ‘Some poets go on and on about the moon. That’s dangerous. Very likely to produce madness in the impressionable reader.’

  ‘Well, that’s me.’

  ‘Wait and see. My guess is that the chaos ends. At some point, you’re sure, and then you stop thinking about escape.’

  ‘Is that how it goes?’

  ‘When you’re sure about whether or not you’re in love, let me know. I’ll prescribe a poet closer to the ground.’ He put his arm over my shoulder. ‘We’ll keep you a safe distance from the moon.’

  I laughed at last, and told Dad I would be alright. If he was worried about Anthony and Claire’s influence, he never said it, and insisted to me that Anthony could stay over whenever he wanted. They liked each other – their first impressions of each other had been right – and sometimes would take it in turns to tease me. They both thought I was too serious, even if they both knew that I was, in fact, the least preoccupied of us.

  Anthony took to visiting every second or third night. He wanted to get away from his father, and so he talked to mine instead. I liked to listen, and I didn’t interrupt. I wasn’t always being ponderous, even if that’s how it appeared. But sometimes I preferred to think about Claire and what she might be doing. About how difficult it might be to break her out of the boarding school one night and bring her down to the beach, as she had brought me to the markets that day.

  Anthony knew much more about my father’s public world than I did, or all the thinking behind it, at least. They could talk about history, about Dworkin and Hayek and American legal realism, and I could see how relieved Dad was to have someone questioning the role of the law, someone to argue with. He accepted the chance to hear Anthony’s lectures on peaceful anarchy, better farming practices, whatever came up each night – that the world was burning itself and that no legal system could ever keep up with what lay ahead. If they both knew that Anthony’s opinions sounded more like album titles than arguments, it didn’t matter. The point was dissent, and the eventual possibility of change. That was exciting.

  For his part, Dad warned Anthony that one day he might have to stop fighting and come up with something constructive. ‘Maybe in your paintings,’ Dad told him. ‘It’s always possible to produce something useful in art. Something more than statements.’

  Anthony made fun of himself, and said of course he had his views and always would. But he wasn’t blind to the obvious. ‘The most constructive thing in the world is a woman’s body,’ he said, ‘and that’s why it’s the most beautiful thing, too.’

  Dad looked at me, and for a moment the two of them waited for me to say something. But now that the conversation had finally caught up with my own thoughts, I tried to push the two of them back to their abstractions, their masculine deductions. ‘Beauty is when the high and the low are equal,’ I offered.

  ‘Claire’s only high,’ said Anthony, refusing the bait.

  At the end of the night, Dad let us take a scotch down to the beach. We both carried down glasses but very different conversations that we wanted to have. I needed to talk about Claire, not whether she was beautiful or not, but simpler things like how she and Anthony had met and fallen in love, and what her life had been like before then.

  ‘I love your dad,’ said Anthony instead. ‘Almost as much as I love you.’

  I told him to light us cigarettes, and we sat drinking. There was a stalemate, for neither of us would return to the other’s conversation. I didn’t want to figure Dad out, not then. I didn’t think I’d ever know what happened in Whitby before we came. Maybe Anthony thought he wouldn’t ever know Claire as she’d been before he met her. For once, I could refer him to a poem, ‘Maiden Name’ by Larkin. He said he would read it.

  He put his arm around me. ‘Thank God for this.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘For having somewhere I’m not made to feel horrible about myself.’

  ‘Is that what your dad does?’

  ‘Well, he hates me. Or maybe he just hates everything. It’s worse for Mum. She doesn’t have anywhere to go, like I do.’

  ‘Could she get away? The two of you.’

  ‘She’s too scared to leave him.’

  I wanted to ask more, but Anthony said not to. There was no point in going over it. We got tipsy quickly, and then cold. I gazed solemnly at the moon, and decided it had too many admirers and deserved none. The moon was an idiot. There were hundreds of girls I liked: Kirsty, Angie, Julie.

  ‘They all end in -ee,’ Anthony observed.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said.

  ‘And they’re all short, Ted. You can’t fall in love with short girls. You’re too tall.’

  ‘Shut up. I’ll fall in love with whoever I want.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  And perhaps that was the moment to tell him. ‘You don’t know her,’ I muttered.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘nearly the truth. I know her, and I don’t.’ He ran down our dune, out of sight of the house and onto the beach, past the shadows thrown by porch lights and towards the white light at the water’s edge.

  ‘Come back!’ I yelled.

  ‘No!’ he called, and so I ran down after him. I didn’t want him swimming in the dark. It was dangerous. I tackled him in the shallows. Dad’s music was going. I think we wanted to disturb him. But it was breezy, and there was no way he’d hear us, no
matter how loudly we shouted.

  If I didn’t catch Anthony after school, most afternoons I went next door to Eric’s garden and we would talk about his repairs to the dune – trying to hold back the erosion of the dune wall. Or about the fishing, which was his other main recreation. I’d begun to notice that his place wasn’t really a house. It didn’t have foundations, but sat like an over-large construction office on old bricks and timbers. The grass stopped growing as it neared the edge of this hut, abashed by low shadows.

  ‘Is this actually your house?’ I asked him once.

  ‘Well, I don’t own it, if that’s what you mean.’ Eric was what he called a ‘permanent temporary’, and he said that there was nothing better. Don’t get stuck, he warned.

  And yet he seemed completely stuck, even if only temporarily. I went inside once. Once was enough. He wanted to show me his record collection, which I think he’d long hoped to present as a rival to my father’s. Mainly, it was Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie, big-band legends and dance-hall favourites. The only real music. He said, ‘I don’t play them as loudly as your dad. I’m a much more considerate neighbour.’

  ‘Maybe that’s a good idea,’ I joked. ‘He deals with a lot of noise complaints.’

  ‘About time I fucking made one,’ grumbled Eric.

  He tended his garden almost to the point of feminine care, but inside you saw only the signs of a wearying bachelor life: an unwashed fry pan, the ash tray by the solitary armchair, bare walls. I wondered whether I wasn’t seeing my father’s life as it would have been without books and the law as companions, or without me to take care of.

  Each year, Eric was seemingly more certain that he had a duty to guide me past my father’s strange life, and closer to something like his own. He complained if he heard me coming home late from a party; I was wasting my youth. Or if I wasn’t often enough at his place, visiting, consulting him about the vital business of the erosion of our crumbling dune, which like his temperament worsened with the passing years. He worried that one day I might even become a lawyer.

  ‘That’s what Dad wants,’ I told him.

  ‘Don’t listen to him, you idiot. Do something you care about.’

  ‘I’m quite interested in the law,’ I said nervously.

  ‘No you’re not,’ said Eric. ‘No one is. What you’re interested in is your own miserable patch. No lawyer but your father cares about anything else. And let’s face it, he’s a bit of a failure.’

  It was meant as a compliment, I knew. ‘I’m not going to work on boats, Eric.’

  ‘That’s exactly what you should do. It’s in your blood.’ It was just the two of us, but he seemed to draw me aside. ‘I’ve got the apprenticeship forms. I’ll get them.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I whispered.

  He went inside and returned with the paperwork. ‘You’d make a good boat builder, and a lousy lawyer.’

  There was the Yorkshire bloodline. But otherwise I wasn’t sure what quality Eric had located. Perhaps it was just that I was old enough to leave school now, if I wanted. Or that we liked each other and could spend hours talking about nothing in particular, apparently a central quality of boat builders, and also, I supposed, of painters sitting on the dune, and perhaps even of those who liked to write about these things.

  The willingness to wait, until you knew where to wander to next.

  Sometimes Claire would ring me at home and ask if Anthony was around. If he wasn’t, we stayed talking on the phone, and the afternoon would pass while I sat on the hallway floor and listened to her voice.

  ‘I wish Anthony was there,’ she once said.

  ‘Do you need to talk to him about something?’

  ‘It’s not that. But I like it when he’s at your place. I wish you two spent even more time together. I wish the three of us did.’

  ‘I see enough of him,’ I joked.

  There was a pause, and then she went on. ‘Yesterday I was missing Anthony, but then I realised I wanted to see you and Anthony – both of you, together.’

  ‘Well, I’m your friend, too,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but you know what I mean.’

  I wasn’t sure I did, not completely. But one afternoon, instead of waiting for Anthony outside the school gates or riding home to talk to Eric, I found myself wandering across town towards Claire’s school. St Margaret’s watched over the coastline from the first step in the slow rise that took you out of town.

  I was surprised to find that I wasn’t alone: there were a few of us drifting up the hill, away from the shoreline and up towards a brick school chapel. We all took the same shortcuts across the second oval at the rugby league club, through the police car park, and then one of those private yards that over the years had become an easement, seemingly for state-school admirers of private-school girls.

  I worried that there might be others going to visit Claire, but as we neared it was obvious they weren’t there to meet anyone in particular. It was merely an assembly point. Girls in hockey gear poured out, and the boys hung back by the chapel, offering each other cigarettes. It began to rain lightly, and we leant against the chapel wall to catch what shelter we could from the narrow eaves above.

  I kept an eye out for Claire, but, rather than wait any longer with the others, I circled the chapel hoping to find her on the other side. The boys were strangely courteous about this: they pretended not to notice me circling the building. Maybe I wasn’t as odd as I felt, or being odd was part of what we were doing there.

  I’d almost given up, and stood with the others on the front steps, when I heard Claire’s voice. ‘Where’s Anthony?’

  I turned to face her. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  I didn’t know what to say. ‘I had some time. I’m meeting Dad in town.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You’re playing hockey?’

  ‘Every Thursday,’ she said.

  We glanced towards a stone wall that protected the hockey pitch. Some of my own schoolmates jogged over there to join in a conversation with one of Claire’s teachers. ‘Will they have to leave?’ I asked.

  ‘If they call out.’

  ‘Call out?’

  ‘They think it’s funny. “Good shot”. “Great angles”.’

  I smiled. Actually, more than anything it sounded open. ‘You should be grateful for the encouragement.’

  ‘I don’t care. They’re not here to see me.’ Her hair was tied back, but the rain worked free the strands at the front. ‘I should go,’ she said. ‘I’m meant to be training.’

  ‘Do you mind if I stay for a bit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You do mind?’

  ‘You really want to hang out with those guys?’

  I looked again at the wall. The teacher had left and was gathering the girls for a talk in the middle of the field. The boys seemed alright to me. Of course I wanted to hang out with them.

  ‘Well, Dad’s expecting me,’ I lied.

  ‘You’d better go, then.’

  I walked back down the hill, and felt the light humiliation of being turned away. Couldn’t we have pretended that I’d come up on a whim, and that I would watch her as idly as the others while she and her friends played hockey? Couldn’t I be one of the spectators calling out bad double entendres, eventually sent on my way by a tolerant teacher and the rain?

  An answer lay in my self-deceit. I wanted to see her on our own. And really that was all I wanted, nothing more. An hour when I could talk to her away from Anthony or her crowded life at the boarding school. A chance to listen to her properly, and to maybe discover if she loved Anthony in the way that I thought he loved her, or more in the way that I loved her.

  In my mind, the main reason my father and Anthony got along so well was because they loved the women in their lives in the same way.
They’d both come to read their love as they read books: something you could collapse into while also remaining fundamentally alone.

  Sometimes Anthony copied quotes from poems and novels, especially from Dickinson, and the modern greats like Woolf, Lawrence and Waugh – writers we liked. He gave me his selection of quotes as keepsakes, and often accompanied them with his drawings – the first experiments of an artist who saw words as physical images. Often he read as a way of finding ideas for paintings, and he painted in order to cement his relationship with the shape of words, I thought, more so than with their meaning.

  And then he began to illustrate the quotes with self-portraits. He emphasised to the point of ugliness his long neck, his broad and angular shoulders, his flat chest. But his handsomeness, his dissenting beauty, also appeared: the very finely drawn nose and his high cheekbones. He saw it, but as with his talk of Claire he also shaded his beauty into an idea. Something that could then be argued over, intellectualised, and even destroyed. And whenever I asked what Claire was like when they first met, he avoided the question altogether. Or he answered, ‘Find out for yourself.’

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to try that again.

  9

  I was certain I’d learnt this: there was a great, poetical love that resided in thought, reflection and art. There was also an everyday love that was better captured by movement and sight and the brush of hands. And although beauty was the most unreliable guide, forever insisting on itself as final evidence of its worth, I sensed also that it formed a connection between different kinds of love. Beauty demanded something to happen: without it, it seemed you’d need the gravity of the moon, or the uneven sweep of the tides, in order to draw people out of themselves, and the two kinds of love onto the same section of the beach. Claire was too beautiful. All and everything this meant was that she made me want to understand both her and myself better – the two searches had become the same.

  But I knew better than to make any more visits to the hockey field; I only saw Claire in Anthony’s company after that failed trip at better discovering who she might be without him. And our visits to the beach, too, became less regular. They were fighting. Every few weeks, Anthony announced that Claire was leaving him. When I asked why, he said it was because he was an idiot, nothing more complicated than that. But this opened up quite a few possibilities. I knew that she didn’t like it when he drank, or argued with strangers, or smoked marijuana and started talking about death and beauty as though, in fact, they were inseparable. As though they were the two ends of love.