Hidden Symptoms (7 page)

Little Tommy held to his eyes an oblong of red plastic, thrice dimpled, in which had nestled some of Mr. Kipling's Exceedingly Good Jam Tarts. He saw the world in the round; rosy-pink when the light was strong and changing deeper to red as the light dimmed; and he saw it roughly because of the way in which the plastic was stippled. The view he obtained of his home city was thus narrow, inaccurate and highly coloured: defensible in a five-year-old peering through a piece of cake-box packaging, but not in the older citizens who shared his vision. The violence and political struggles had effected less change than was generally acknowledged: it had not altered Belfast's perception of itself. It remained an introverted city, narcissistic, nostalgic and profoundly un-European (this latter in spite of one's now being able to purchase there croissants in tins).

Robert worked hard that summer, primarily in the fine arts department of the Central Library. He frequently raised his eyes to the little artist's pallets which formed part of the stucco ornamentation around the ogee'd skylight, and inwardly he groaned. He felt that he deserved something better than the boredom of summer in Belfast, and the dull, uncreative work on which he was engaged. He had vaguely expected a more exciting, a more fulfilling life, and only in instances did he realize that it had
not materialized and that it probably never would. In lucid flashes, he feared that this tedious summer was a microcosm of his whole future life: lonely, frustrating, dull, dragged out in a lunatic, self-destructive city. He could not have defined the life he wanted; could not have named another person whose art or scope he desired. Perhaps every life was unsatisfactory; perhaps the feeling which predominantly united humanity was not loneliness or love, but a deep sense of failure. He knew no one whose life seemed a fair compensation for the horror of having to die.

The only new person whom he had met that summer was the unlikable Theresa, whose newness and surliness gave her at least a certain novelty value. She also frequented the fine arts department, and was there almost as often as Robert, her desk piled with books and papers, journals, magazines and literary reviews. Her labours seemed even more aimless and unsatisfactory than Robert's, lost in a welter of paper, reading erratically or scribbling in a large red notebook. At worst she was killing time in the library, putting in a summer which had to be got through in some way; at best she was trying to make sense of things through what she read and wrote, but it gave her little comfort. Her own definitions were unsatisfactory; but what she read frequently confirmed her fear that loneliness was inescapable.

“Death is like a fisher who catches fish in his net and leaves them in the water for a little while; the fish is still swimming but the net is around him and the fisher will draw him up — when he thinks fit.” She wondered if
people in general shared her iceberg mentality: was it common to feel that only a tiny facet of one's self was exposed and communicable to others, with the rest locked in ice, vast, submerged and impossible? She caught Robert's glance as it passed between his desk and the stucco, and she surprised him wih a tiny, timid smile.

Possibly other people were like this unconsciously, and did not realize how little they were known and understood by those around them, nor how little they knew or understood of themselves. Her daily life was very mundane that summer. She idled in the library and in bookshops, frequently had lunch with Kathy and went to occasional films, plays and art exhibitions. She went to mass often and lived quietly, peaceably, with her mother, who did not realize just how few friends her daughter had. Except for Rosie, who thought that there was something sad about her, no one realized that practically her every thought was an unhappy one, and that she was being quietly ground down by constant nagging, absolute distress. She complained frequently of being tired, exhausted even: no one could understand why. She wondered if sometime she would scream aloud what often screamed in her mind: “No! Leave me to have my own life!” If only he had been a husband or a lover, anything but a brother. His death had pitched her into love as much as grief; rather, it let her see how deeply and hopelessly she had been steeped in love, in utter passion for him since the day of their birth. But he was her brother and now he was dead, so that this love was exclusively of the family; worse, of the grave. She swung from feel
ings of betrayal and revulsion at the idea of similarly loving anyone else to desperate loneliness from the knowledge that she could not do so. She thought that love should not make her feel so trapped, but it did, and she felt it beyond her power to change this.

Her mother told her that she was wasting her summer.

“You ought to take a holiday before you go back to college.”

Theresa shragged indifferently.

“Go abroad,” her mother said.

“No.”

While in Italy with Francis, she had had a bar of sandalwood soap, and in the course of the journey the atmosphere of that summer had seeped into the soap, so that forever afterwards the smell of sandalwood made her immensely sad, evoking the hot, crowded trains, with their little pull-down seats in the corridors; fusty churches; great art; bitter coffee; and the shabby hotels and inns where they had put up. In Trieste, they found lodgings from a tourist office, where the girl was so anxious that they did not confuse the two inns of the particular street to which she was sending them (“The other one is not at
all
nice”) that they became convinced it was a brothel; a conviction strengthened when they saw how very seedy was the establishment to which they had been carefully directed. While the owner was copying their names from their passports for registration, Francis whispered to Theresa: “You wouldn't see that in Ireland,” and nodded towards two framed pictures hanging on the wall only
inches apart; one a gaudy print of the Madonna and Child, the other a highly erotic etching of a female nude.

Trieste was a forlorn port whose glory had crumbled away when an empire fell and left it sitting bleak, uneasy on a frontier. Theresa and Francis soon wondered why they had gone there, for there was little to see or do, and that little obscured by a sea mist which hung persistently over the bay for the few days they were there. They stood down by the harbour, where dry grass sprouted between broken cobblestones and diseased, scabby pigeons picked around their feet. Francis claimed that he could see things in spite of the fog. He pointed out the Miramare, the Faro and distant ships, but Theresa could see nothing.

“It's your poor wee turney eye,” he teased her, “that's what's wrong. Mustn't Mammy have been fierce disappointed when you were born and she saw the eye rollin' in your head? I can see her sittin' up in bed in the maternity ward with the baby in her arms, shakin' it and tiltin' it to try to get the eye to roll into position, like one of those games you used to get in the lid of a tube of Malteasers at Christmas, where you had to roll three ball-bearings into three wee dimples.”

“Meanie,” said Theresa. “I'll have you know that some people find my eye very attractive.”

From Trieste they went to Venice, and only a few hours after their arrival she fell ill with cramps. She told Francis to go out and leave her to suffer alone in peace, and promised that she would meet him by the door of St. Mark's Basilica three hours later. When the time came,
she felt weak but sufficiently well to walk the short distance from the pensione to St. Mark's Square, which she had not yet seen.

A drawing-room indeed; elegant, timeless, beautiful. Here was where the doges had thrown rings of flowers into the water to marry the city to the sea. Real ladies in heavy, trailing silk dresses had moved beneath the loggia, and all seemed fused to a timeless perfection, the past and the present, the fictional and the religious. It was evening, and the sun fell slantingly against the walls of the Palace; the sky was turbid and promised thunder. Some light rain had already fallen, and the stones of the square were bright and wet. There were many people there, mostly tourists, all strangers; and then suddenly she had seen Francis's face materialize out of the crowd, as familiar to her as her own foot or finger. This was what she had been seeking, and the faces of all those other people were masks, dross, distortions, faces which were wrong: suddenly the only right and real face in Venice had appeared.

As she watched him move across the damp marble towards her, she felt a sweep of love which was the sole complement to the loneliness she would feel before the statue in Rome, and this loneliness and love would be fused together in the black moment of grief when she learnt that he was dead.

In Venice, a man with an umbrella hat had tried to sell them handfuls of birdseed, which they refused, and they refused more vehemently the photographer who attempted to hand to them a toy gondola on which was
perched a miserable-looking little monkey in a blue-and-white-striped knitted suit, with a small hole in the seat of the trousers out of which hung a long, long tail. Francis had impressed her with his knowledge of the history, art and architecture of the city, and with the sensitivity of his response to the beauty around him.

“You're wasting your life, Francis,” she said. “Please, why don't you think again? Change jobs, or go back to college.”

He frowned. “It's too late.”

“Nonsense, it's never too late, how could you…”

“I mean for college. It's too late for me to apply for re-entry for this autumn.”

“Next year, then.”

“I don't think so. I don't know, Theresa. I'm sure of nothing. Look, leave it and I'll see in the winter, when I'm home and settled, alright?”

“Alright, then.”

But before the autumn ended, he was dead.

The coda to that summer was a day spent in Lugano when they were on their way home, and by the side of the lake they saw a small boy with golden-tanned skin and a navy sailor-suit who was tossing little pebbles to break and break again the lake's still surface. He was quite unaware that he was being watched, and Theresa and Francis looked at him for a long time before Theresa spoke.

“If we had been here a hundred years ago, we might well have seen such a child.”

Francis continued to look at him and did not answer her for quite some time, then said, “Yes. When you think of that and continue to look at him he ceases to be a particular small boy and becomes the eternal small boy. We're all like that. Everything we suffer has been suffered before, everything that gives us joy has been enjoyed before. Nothing is new: but that doesn't make it any easier to suffer.”

“And joy?”

He smiled. “It doesn't diminish joy.”

And the summer's final image was a little Lugano fountain, the basin of which had been painted sky blue. People had dropped coins into the water for wishes and good luck, and the blue paint was marked with brown or green rings where the coins had lain and corroded. A stream of bright, fresh water spurted to the sky through a thin bronze pipe, and as it tumbled down to the painted bowl it caught and warped the sunlight. They dipped their hands in the cold water and accidentally their fingers touched. Now, when she tried to visualize the distant Heaven where Francis was, her imagination balked and she could think only: perhaps a well of light; perhaps a stream of bright water ascending to the sun, spurting upwards and away from a small, blue, painted, tainted bowl.

Night had fallen. Robert sat by his desk and stared obliquely at the window, behind which a perfect image of his room was suspended in the dark air. He arose and walked to another chair so that he, too, was now reflected
and was thus substantially within and insubstantially without. Glumly, he stared at his dark doppelganger, which stared back as it floated above the street in its intangible apartment. Could this room and this person, who looked so solid and so real, actually be a mere reflection, nothing more than a trick of glass, air and light? Yes, it was just that, and he found the realization liberating. The reflection looked like him but it was not him: this is me, he thought, refined to perfection. A shadow upon glass could not feel worried or lonely. It could not have a sister or a girlfriend or a dull book to compile. Its body could not feel pain. I should write to the papers, he thought, and say political initiative be damned! The solution to the Irish crisis is for everyone to live by night, to put strong lights in their rooms and draw back the curtains and so make a whole new population identical to the one here now in all things but reality. Let these dark illusions live our lives for us: they will do it much better than we can. For how can a reflection hate? Or be bigoted? Or kill? How could it ever know the futility of suffering? He gave a little laugh which his dark double mirrored. He wished that he could stop being himself and become that double so that he could be dissolved into nothingness when the morning came.

He turned from the window and looked back into his own room. It made him feel ill. He wondered why he accumulated so assiduously this arty clutter of books and prints and rugs and trinkets; such having and hoarding
struck him as rather pathetic. Often he felt genuinely queasy just to think of the vast glut of personal possessions in the world. On his way to the library in the mornings, he tried not to imagine all the things which people around him in the streets had recently used; tried to keep at bay a nightmare vision of countless tea-bags and crusts and toothbrushes and combs and bus tickets and socks. Too much reality was hard to bear. He liked to see the private lives of girls in the morning, but one at a time, please! What fascinated him singly revolted him en masse, and the most haunting image he retained from reading about the Holocaust was that of the liberating Allied troops finding the vast mounds of clothing which had been taken from the prisoners on their arrival, including the swallow-tail coats and expensive evening dresses of some wealthy Viennese Jews arrested at a gala evening.

He had gone back to Rosie that afternoon to end a week of festering ill-feeling, although he had gone not knowing whether it was to demand an apology or to make one. In the event, neither happened. Rosie received him kindly and behaved as if nothing had happened, until he brought the subject into the open.

“Oh, let’s forget it,” she said. “It’s not important, we all lose the rag now and then, what does it matter?”

She made tea for him, and their subsequent conversation was overlaid by bangs and thumps from the upper storey, which he presumed, correctly, to be caused by Tom. After a time the banging stopped, they heard heavy
feet on the stairs, and then the feckless beast stuck his head around the living-room door, giving a surprised grin when he saw Robert.

“What about ye, Bobby, I never knew ye were in. Nobody tells me nathin’ around here.”

He had been assembling a cot for the new baby and had come down to tell Rosie that the job was complete. With characteristic bonhomie, he insisted that Robert come up to see his handiwork, and so they all trudged up the narrow stairs to a tiny back room, where little Tommy was waiting with the new cot.

“There,” said Tom, picking up a small, thin mattress printed all over with pandas. “Bung in this yoke an’ Bob’s yer uncle.”

“Bob is my uncle,” chirruped Tommy and they all laughed, except Rosie, who only smiled and tenderly stroked the veneered chipboard. Watching their innocent delight, Robert realized that he saw before him a thing rare in modern times: familia intacta. They had problems and would have many more; in so many ways he found them pathetic, contemptible, even, but there they were, undeniably real, united and happy. He thought of the other families he knew, broken or decimated, and remembered reading somewhere that the family was the only social unit which could survive beyond the grave. Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit. Two bright Cumberland eyes had peeped from a bonnet, their owner insisting, “Nay, Master, we are seven.” Tom and Rosie beamed shyly at each other and Robert’s throat tightened. He hated himself for being moved by scenes of such maudlin
sentimentality; it was worse than crying at
The Sound of
Music
. He could never see himself in the role of family man, but here, in this tiny bedroom, he now felt the lonely pangs of a monk who, on Saturday afternoons, watches at play the children of men and women who have come to the monastery for blessings, honey and fortified wines, and knows that he will never have a family of his own.

What did it matter that all Rosie’s taste was in her mouth? He looked up from his chair to the print of a Van Gogh self-portrait which he had acquired a short time before one of Rosie’s rare visits to his flat.

“Who’s that?”

“Van Gogh. It’s a copy of a painting he did of himself. Do you like it?”

“He could have smiled.”

He had tried then and he tried now to imagine Vincent beaming down from his frame, jolly and avuncular, but at both attempts he failed. Now he, Robert, had at least the grace to smile.

Rising from his chair, he crossed to the window. For a moment he again looked out into the phantom room and stared deep into the eyes of his dark fetch until he could bear it no longer. Abruptly, he let the blind drop.