Hidden Symptoms Page 10

  The numbers on the screen had dropped swiftly towards the end. When they clicked to double-zero and the green line became straight, Robert and Rosie turned quickly to each other, and each saw in the other’s eyes disbelief and shock.

  He walked through the door of the maternity ward. Rosie looked up from the baby and smiled at him.

  “Guess who you’ve just missed?” she said.

  Kathy did not keep her appointment with Robert, broke another engagement three days later, and it was almost a week after her return when she at last deigned to go to his flat. The meeting was a disaster from the moment he opened the door and said, “Welcome back. How was the family reunion?”

  “Who told you about that?” she said angrily.

  “Theresa,” he replied. “I didn’t know that it was supposed to be a secret. I can’t see why it should be.”

  “And when were you talking to Theresa?”

  Robert began to relate the whole story of her visit and the more he talked the more he wished that he had kept silent. Kathy glowered angrily throughout, although he tried to tell his tale lightly, making it a thing insignificant and amusing. Kathy did not laugh. When he had finished she said, “This is all news to me. I’ve seen Theresa three times since I got back and she didn’t say anything about it.”

  “Do you wonder?” he exclaimed with a giggle of desperate mirth. “It doesn’t show her in a very good light.”

  “It’s not much to your credit, either.”

  “I don’t know what you can mean,” he said stiffly. “She came of her own accord and half-plastered. I didn’t want her; I thought she was a right pest. She was lucky I didn’t throw her out on her ear five minutes after she arrived.”

  “Such kindness and charity,” Kathy sneered defensively.

  London had confused her. At first she had felt a union with her father and his family, and had delighted in their casual lives. The elder of the two girls strongly resembled Kathy and had many of her mannerisms; her father’s second wife, Sophie, was young and friendly. But, as the days went on, a feeling of alienation crept over her. All the little things which distanced her from the family gradually became more obvious. She became increasingly conscious of the children’s English accents, so different to her own; and of the fact that they were only half-sisters. One day, as a joke, Kathy referred to Sophie as her stepmother, and both of them immediately realized that it was the truth. From that moment on, they were never completely comfortable in each other’s company. Gradually, she admitted to herself that she was not one of the family: it was her father’s family, but it was not hers.

  The night before she was due to come home, she lay awake in bed thinking of all the little failures and inadequacies of the trip; of all the moments when a word or a look had proved to her (although without malice) that she was only a visitor, and she had been seized with a sudden craving for a family life, a life of her own. She knew all the difficulties and drawbacks, but still she wanted it. Now she was glad that she had not told cynical old Robert why she was going to London. He would have laughed, she thought, if she told him this. He set little store by his own family; he would never understand. As soon as she arrived in Belfast, she missed her father and the family so much that she could hardly bear it. She could not talk about her loneliness, and so translated it into anger. Robert and Theresa had unwittingly given her a convenient target for this anger.

  Robert watched her, and knew that Theresa had been right. Kathy had changed; and he worried about the consequences.

  September arrived, damp and cold, and Theresa thought with dread of the coming winter. It would bring Francis’s second anniversary, the horrors of Christmas, with all its maudlin sentimentality and aggressive bonhomie, followed by the New Year, which she always found unspeakably sad. She did not understand how people could celebrate the passage of time. January: the dead of winter. She would have to drag herself somehow through the dark, dreary months of the young year, until spring came, with Easter, green shoots and the first shred of hope. She seriously wondered if this time she would have the stamina to make it through to March, for it seemed a lifetime away.

  Feeling wilful and trapped, Theresa knelt in church before the crucifix, remembering how, when it was veiled in Lent, it had looked like a kite of purple silk. Once, during the unveiling on Good Friday, the priest had dropped one of the elastic bands which held the silk in place, and she had seen it lying on the carpet as she knelt at the altar rails, a long, fine, gum-coloured lemniscate. The stuff of religious symbols was so paltry and mundane: paper and stone and metal and wood and wax; but perhaps this purple veil upon a cross was the best symbol possible. Silk stretched over wood; a symbol concealing a symbol. Things of importance and truth were always layered and hidden. When Francis died, they had placed him in a coffin with a small chrome crucifix fixed to the lid; and she remembered looking at it and knowing that she would never again be afraid to die. In Russia, his coffin would have been carried open to the graveside, but they had not been permitted to see his poor dead face and cold forehead. She remembered tenderly stroking the wood of the coffin and trying to visualize his dear, broken body within. She imagined his features sharpened in death, sharper, sharper to corruption, and then she knew why medieval knights and lords had had statues carved or wrought to represent their own bodies, and placed upon their tombs. These people of marble and bronze were first an image of the body which lay beneath, but soon became a dishonest distraction, attempting to belie the hidden bones and dust. Whited sepulchres. Futility. His coffin had been carried for a short distance and then placed in the hearse. Theresa and her mother had found themselves looking at their own reflections, ghostly and bloodless as photographic negatives, cast upon the glass behind which lay the solid coffin and a few bright wreaths of flowers.

  She wondered why she worried the memory of his death again and again, like a dog with a bone, for she felt that the death itself was not at the heart of her distress. When she watched his burial, it was as if the gravediggers were tucking him up for the rest of time with a thick brown blanket, living and warm and moist. She knew that in springtime his grave would be greened over with grasses and weeds, and she believed that her brother was now perfected. Too late she wished that she had jumped in with him, so that the gravediggers could cover up the living and dead together: she longed for the soft, damp soil to muffle her ears and gag her mouth, to seal her eyes up in union and death.

  Months later, she had scribbled on a scrap of paper, “I loved him too much,” then tossed it into the fire and watched it burn.

  “Do you reject Satan?”

  “I do.”

  “And all his works?”

  “I do.”

  “And all his empty promises?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of Heaven and earth?”

  “I do.”

  Robert listened as the sacramental words dropped into the still, cold air of the church. It gave him a curious sensation, as if he were attending not a baptism in West Belfast, but a primitive and mysterious religious ceremony in a gloomy, subterranean temple, far distant in both time and space from the reality he knew. That reality was a late Sunday afternoon in September, and already the darkness was pressing lightly against the windows, draining all colour and so making it difficult to distinguish the saints and symbols depicted in the stained glass. At the top of the church there was a rectangular candelabra, where numerous little discs of white wax were ranged in tiers, their flames waving, guttering and making the air all around them glow, while down at the back, where the font stood, there was little light save from a single candle which Tom’s brother was holding in his capacity as godfather. Its flame cast ghastly and sinister shadows upon the faces of those gathered around, and as the bright baptismal water sparkled across the baby’s forehead it caught the light of the candle. The child did not cry, but Robert could see its little feet working frantically beneath the shawl.

  Theresa
was kneeling almost directly opposite Robert, her eyes closed and her head bowed in prayer. With a jolt, he thought: “She really believes in this. They all do.” They believed that mere water and words and all this theatrical mumbo-jumbo had the power to free the baby from the grip of evil. They believed that this ceremony was absolutely vital for the well-being of the child. They spoke of the Devil as if he were lurking behind a nearby pillar. Robert tried to imagine the Devil, and saw him as tall, thin and blood-red, with thick, black hair and cold, dark eyes. He saw the Devil toy thoughtfully with the barb at the end of his long, slimy tail and take particular care to stand very still, lest his cloven hooves be heard to rattle upon the stone floor of the church.. Robert felt a nervous giggle rise in his throat, and he bowed his head.

  But what if it all were true? God and the Devil. Sin and death. Heaven and Hell. What if this water and light really meant something? What if there were four last things to be remembered instead of just one? He raised his eyes and looked at the little group before him. Try as he might, he found it impossible to understand, or imagine, or empathize with, their belief, and because of this inability he thought that belief must make a huge difference to the way one saw life — saw everything. It was little wonder that he had had such difficulty with his mother, or that he could not understand Rosie or Theresa. Even Kathy would admit, under pressure, that she believed in God. Robert’s closest approach to faith in the last ten years had been when he looked at his mother’s dead body and found that he could not believe that what he saw was in any significant way the person he had known. More importantly, he could not believe that she was nowhere, that she was simply gone, annihilated. He felt that she must be somewhere, but he could not begin to imagine where; could never have dared to define or name the state or place where his mother now was. Suddenly he understood the drift of his thoughts, and his mind balked in horror. It implied too much for him, and filled him with dread. She is dead, he told himself, dead, dead, dead.

  Now, in church, he remembered that moment, and felt pity for believers. The priest talked about evil, and Robert felt afraid. He wished that he had not come. The wax of the candle steadily dripped.

  They all went back to Rosie’s and Tom’s house after the christening, as Rosie had prepared a small buffet, the centrepiece of which was a large fruit cake coated in royal icing and garnished with a pink plastic stork. Robert ensured that Theresa was well supplied with tea, ham sandwiches and sausage rolls, then edged her into a corner and was surprised to find himself bluntly asking, “Theresa, do you really believe in all that mumbo-jumbo?”

  “The christening? Why, yes, of course I do. I wouldn’t have been there otherwise.”

  “But don’t you find it … medieval? I mean, it’s so … so creepy.”

  “In what way?” she asked, nibbling on a sandwich.

  “Well, for example, what has a little baby got to do with sin and evil and the Devil?”

  “Rather a lot, I should think, seeing that said baby has been doomed by birth to life in Belfast,” she said drily. “Don’t try to tell me that there’s no evil in this city just because you can’t see a Devil with cloven hooves wandering around.”

  “Is that what the Devil looks like, then?”

  “How should I know? He probably looks like lots of things. He might look a bit like you, who can say?” She smirked and wiped some crumbs from the corner of her mouth. He ignored the insult and persisted with his interrogation.

  “But why are you a Christian, Theresa?”

  She shrugged and said, “Because it’s a good religion for me.”

  “But why?”

  She gave a deep sigh and replied in a soft voice, “Because it’s the religion for victims and failures. It’s for people who are diseased and depraved. It’s for people who are subversive; who can detect and denounce evil even when it looks comfortable and respectable, and particularly when it’s in their own hearts and minds. People who can see below the surface of things, and who have difficulty in accepting their own existence. But I’m not answering your question, am I?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No. There’s only one valid reason for believing in Christianity.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Because it’s the truth. I mean, you can’t be a Christian just because you find it an attractive notion, or because it seems comfortable — you soon find out that it’s not that, anyway. Nor can you do it for the sake of beauty, because it has too much to do with the ugly, broken side of life. You do it because you have to. If you know that Christianity is the truth, then you have no choice but to be a Christian.”

  Robert listened and was lost. He felt as if there were a thick wall of glass between himself and Theresa, for in no way could he relate to what she was saying. It was like hearing someone defending the flat-earth theory, or soberly claiming that they had once caught a unicorn.

  “What’s the point of it all, then?” he asked. “Does it make you happy?”

  “No. Maybe it’s not supposed to. Maybe I’m not a very good Christian. In any case, you do it for God, not for what’s in it for yourself. But it does do one thing: it allows you to live with your own conscience. It means that you’re at least trying to live with integrity; you know that you’re struggling in the right direction …” She fell silent and looked away, for she could not find words to express the tensions which lay between faith and the “however” side of life. Robert could not know what it was like to glimpse perfection and know that that was the state to which one had to aspire, only suddenly to see it offset by the immense imperfection of one’s self. She could not explain how weary it made her to know that she would never be good enough.

  “I want to go home.”

  She said goodbye to Rosie and Tom and thanked them for their hospitality. Robert insisted on walking at least part of the way home with her, and together they set off up the Falls Road. It was twilight. His mother had fallen ill on just such an evening. They had followed the ambulance down to the hospital by car, and on the way he had seen three young girls in pale summer dresses run lightly along the pavement. They had seemed like wraiths in the dusk, and he remembered thinking, “They are not real and so none of this can be reality. This is a dream from which I will soon awaken.”

  Theresa remained silent as they walked. Both were conscious that some reference ought to be made to Kathy, but neither of them could bring themselves to do it. Robert glanced at Theresa and thought it weird that someone could be so near to him and yet so distant in mind and heart. Eventually she said, “This is where I live, goodnight.” He watched while she crossed the road to a high, red-brick terrace, and watched until the home at the end of the row had swallowed her up in blackness.

  Robert sat at his desk in the library, browsing through a large leather-bound volume of newspapers. Although they were less than two years old, they smelt musty and sour. He turned the yellowed pages with great care to avoid tearing them.

  Kathy had arrived at his flat the preceding evening, bringing with her all the books which she borrowed from him in the course of the summer, and had never before troubled to return. He found this ominous. He made coffee while she sat down in the wicker chair where Theresa had sat during her unexpected visit, and when Robert came in from the kitchen with the tray he was annoyed to see her choice of seat, for it was ostentatiously distant from the corner where he habitually sat. He poured out the coffee and put a record on the stereo. She asked politely about his book and he said that it was almost completed. Kathy took a small notebook from her handbag and scribbled something down, then tore out the page and handed it to Robert. “That’s a play to which you ought to refer. It was first produced in Belfast. You should check it out. Get the reviews from the local papers; they’ll have them in the library. I think you’ll find it interesting.” Robert looked at the page. He had never heard of either the play or the author before. Kathy had also conveniently added the date of production. “Thank you,” he said.

  Their s
ubsequent conversation was sparse, for they had nothing left to say to each other. Robert wondered why it always had to end like this, with a steady drifting to indifference and silence. As night fell, he could see the ghostly room begin to crystallize behind the dark glass, and the clearer it became the more it unsettled him. At last he went over to the window and lowered the blinds. As he passed behind Kathy’s chair on the way back, he stopped and tentatively stroked the back of her neck. She swore and jerked her head aside as if she had been stung. “I beg your pardon,” he said very coldly. Hurt and angry, he crossed to the stereo.

  “I think we ought to have a change of music, don’t you? What about this one, it’s perfect, it’s called, ‘I Used to Love Her But It’s All Over Now.’”

  Kathy stood up. “Very amusing, Robert,” she said. “But not quite accurate. You never loved me. But you’re right about its being over.” She picked up her coat and left the room. Robert did not follow and from where he stood he could hear the front door close behind her.