Having spent his whole life asserting the value of literature to his university students, he had to believe that literature offered the best lessons on how to live, but was less certain that it offered the same guidance on how to die. There was little inclination to rage at the dying of the light – his earlier self-conscious expressions of anger had merely embarrassed him – so to counterfeit it and struggle furiously against what he knew couldn’t be prevented, seemed little more than an unwelcome piece of melodrama, a cheap revenge tragedy with a predictable end.
The readiness was all he told himself and even if Claudius was the villain of that piece, he thought him not far off the mark in his assertion that too public and unseemly mourning was unnatural. And in private truth he had never relished the new fashion of people documenting their demise – it felt too much like sharing bad news with strangers who no doubt had their own woes with which to contend. ‘Hard to say,’ was the doctor’s answer to the inevitable question about time, but at least he had been unequivocal in his delivery of the irreversible verdict, admiringly unwilling to ease their mutual embarrassment by tying a little ribbon of hope to it.
He had already set his affairs in order. Everything neat and tidy, hopefully as straight forward as possible for his sister Agnetha, who having found the various letters of instruction and all the relevant information, would in conjunction with his solicitor draw everything to an appropriate legal conclusion. He would have quite liked to have had a library book still in his possession so that it might be returned, but he had stopped using the local library when they had introduced all the computers and the librarian had asked him if he was interested in joining the senior crafts club.
‘Will I get you a cup of tea before I go Mr Ford? Make you a cheese sandwich?’
‘No Aneta, it’s all right, thank you. You don’t want to be late for Mrs Bramley.’
He watched her skite her yellow duster over the kitchen table in a final flamboyant flourish and just for a second thought of telling her. But he didn’t have the words, didn’t know how, and more than anything he didn’t want to risk the possibility of upsetting her, because it was just possible she might feel some affection for him that went beyond what he paid for her twice weekly visits. He had grown fond of her over the years and although she never asked, he suspected she knew things weren’t right. He tried to be careful but it wasn’t possible to have someone come into your house over a period of time and not observe the occasional forgotten indicator of things awry, whether it was the empty blister packets of pills in the bin or a hospital appointment card left momentarily on a hall table.
And he had lost weight – sometimes he felt he was shedding all the surplus years, slowly morphing into his essential self. He tried to tell himself there was a lightness in it, a letting go of what was no longer needed but there were some days he felt weightless, a walking spindrift waiting to be blown hither and thither.
‘Don’t you worry about Mrs Bramley,’ Aneta said, ‘she’ll be a busy bee right now. She always cleans her place before I arrive. The house gets a double doing.’
She laughed and the sun coming through the kitchen window veined her crinkled blond hair and burnished the hooped gold earrings she always wore. He smiled but what he was smiling at was because inexplicably this middle-aged Polish woman with a yellow duster in her hand, wearing what he believed was called a shell suit, had metamorphosed into some illuminated Cleopatra of infinite variety and if he could, even for a moment, become an Anthony he would have rested his weary head in her polyester lap, taken the blessing of her hand on his increasingly hairless skull.
He had left her something, hoped she’d be pleased. Hoped too her son didn’t continue to disappoint her with his inability to settle down or find meaningful employment and that her husband Jan’s car repair business would continue to flourish. In retirement he sat still a lot, reading mostly, so her busy movements about the house, her dusting and vacuuming, her wielding of an iron, appeared to set the air in vibration and even after she left it seemed to take silent hours before stillness settled again.
‘You going out today Mr Ford? Maybe a walk to the park or round to the shops. It’s a lovely day.’
‘Yes, I might do that. If the sun stays out.’
‘Enjoy your walk then. See you on Friday.’
And then she was gone, the air atremble in her wake and he added his voice to its disturbed vibrations by thanking her even though she would be already scurrying on her way to Mrs Bramley’s house, a street away. Then he got up, took the last of his daily tablets and put on his winter coat even though the spring sunshine was spearing into the room.
He felt a nagging sense of regret that the course of his life merely engendered something approaching indifference to its ending. So what then was this excursion? There were times when its conception embarrassed him but there were others when its impulsiveness gave him comfort because he told himself that it was in impulse, in the unpredictable, that he could assert himself, if only temporarily, over what was preordained. And he knew at its heart was the desire to turn once more some of the pages of his truest existence and feel his life warmed by the year’s burgeoning light. It would not bring healing – he was not given to fantasy – but he’d allow himself the hope that it might somehow invigorate what remained.
The taxi driver sounded the horn, but only once and lightly polite, and in response he buttoned his coat and put on his gloves. For some reason he wasn’t sure about he felt the cold most in his hands but dismissed as fanciful the thought that somehow it signified a loosening grip. As usual it was Aasim waiting for him and he was pleased because it was Aasim who drove him to his hospital appointments and knew how to be discrete, when to talk and when to be silent.
‘Family all well?’ he asked as he got into the back seat.
‘All well Mr Ford,’ Aasim said. ‘Bahir has his exams coming up. Too much time on computer games I tell him. Needs to get his head in his books. No time to waste.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s already done very well and he’s heading for a very good university if he makes the grades.’
He knew it was a good university because Aasim had asked his advice and even though his son’s choice of subjects wasn’t in his field he’d made some enquiries of former colleagues and gathered up useful information. Had even spent some time with Bahir before he’d gone for interview.
‘No time to waste.’ Aasim repeated and drove a little more quickly as if taking his own advice but there was no need to rush, the train didn’t leave for another thirty minutes.
At the station he slipped Aasim a tip on his fare and told him again he was sure everything would work out for Bahir. He couldn’t say which thing Aasim was most grateful for but he took both with thanks and told him to ring before the train was due back and he’d be waiting for him.
Set aside a few mostly cosmetic modernisations and the core of the station building was relatively unchanged from the building that sixty years ago had seen their departure for their summer holidays. Their destination as always was a cottage on the south coast they rented every first week in August. Once as a child he had been excited by it but on that last ever trip as a 15-year-old it no longer held much sense of excitement or anticipation. He had grown out of fishing for crabs off the harbour wall, beachcombing with his parents, and the interminable sitting around in deckchairs or on tasselled tartan rugs with his father battling the crosswords he never managed to complete and his mother reading romantic fiction whose covers embarrassed her, so in public she always read them with the pages flapped back.
The train was mostly empty so finding a seat was not a problem but suddenly it took on a metaphysical resonance that left him hesitating in the aisle. Should he sit facing forwards or backwards? It made him smile and then after changing his mind several times opted for a forward view but explaining to himself that the future didn’t have to extend any further than this moment and this day. So soon they were heading south – he thought briefly of Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings but there were no newly-weds on the train, no light filled epiphanies, just a passage through the backs of suburban gardens where at least one owner was giving his grass its first cut of the year, the freshly cut stripes glinting against the unshorn in this the cruellest month.
The young woman with the child a few seats down the carriage glanced at him from time to time. He wondered if he wore his fate on his face. But mostly she was preoccupied with her daughter, turning the pages of a picture book and pointing out things. A blaze of sudden sunlight made him shade his eyes and when he looked up the young woman was standing in front of him.
He didn’t recognise her but it happened from time to time – not frequently but often enough for him to have developed a practised response.
‘How are you?’ he said extending his hand and giving himself a few seconds to locate her in his memory.
‘Sarah Adams, or rather Sarah Miller as I was then,’ she said, sensitive enough to help him and not foolish enough to believe she had made an indelible impression. ‘I was in your tutorial group for the Shakespeare module. I really enjoyed it.’
He thanked her for her kindness, hoped it was the truth and relieved that he wasn’t part of the generation of teachers whose former students viewed them through the dark veil of debt.
He thought he recalled her but wasn’t sure. The quiet ones were always the hardest to summon out of the past.
‘What age is your daughter?’ he asked.
‘She’s five. We’re on our way to see her grandparents.’
He should have offered his own destination but baulked at saying he was going to the seaside so instead he said, ‘Good to see her interested in books.’
‘I’m doing my best. Some way off Shakespeare yet. Good to see you Professor Ford.’
‘Very nice to see you Sarah.’
When she got off at the next station she waved from the platform and her daughter waved too without knowing why or who it was for.
Then the train was in countryside with broad cultivated fields interspersed by woodland that looked as if it existed outside the reach of time, eternally preserved in its own mysterious element or a narrative without an ending.
‘No time to waste,’ Aasim had said and what he now experienced was an increased awareness of the physical fabric of life and that heightened consciousness seemed capable of extending time, of maximising each minute. So his eyes fixed on the spread branches of the tree allowed to stand in the middle of the ploughed field and the way its anarchic twisted expression of itself sat at odds with the linear regularity of the furrows. Saw too that the lime coloured leaves were beginning to dress it anew and how a rising flock of birds suddenly smudged the blueness of the sky.
No time to waste but he would have been happy to sit on the train forever with the world unravelling itself in momentary glimpses but gradually, although he tried not to admit them, other thoughts inscribed themselves across the natural world – his long career, a life invested in the pages of books, a failed marriage that sometimes in the hours before dawn on sleepless nights caused him to wonder whether it was the product of his unwillingness, or inability, to live in the world that defined itself by something other than the endless print of text on page.
Outside the station seagulls clustered in shifting white drifts on nearby roofs but although he looked for it there was no trace of the tang of the sea, only the smell of traffic that flowed in a much greater volume than he remembered. But after almost sixty years he knew it was inexpressibly stupid to imagine that he would find much similarity to the place his family had holidayed in during those far off summers. The street leading from the station had been usurped by coffee shops, fast food outlets and charity shops. What was advertised on the hoardings was superfast fibre broadband and mobile phone deals. It didn’t look much different from the place he had left.
Suddenly he felt foolish and hesitating at the side of the road wondered whether to retrace his steps and catch the next train back, then draw a thankfully private veil over the whole ludicrous impulse. And yet five minutes later he was standing outside the red brick pub that was still called the Cider Tree and which more or less remained the same as he remembered it. There were outside tables in the garden at the side even though the fencing and decking were new and a large pavement blackboard offered live football. He would not go in.
He followed his parents in as he had done most days – they were prone to a late afternoon visit. His mother would have a sherry in a tiny glass that looked as if it had come from a doll’s house and his father would make a light ale last an hour. More than anything it made him feel like a child as he sat with a glass of lemonade and watched as the summer light teased the mysterious wall-mounted optics behind the bar and the old black and white photographs of a vanished industry. It was the longest hour of the week and on that last day when he felt as if he might suffocate, he told his parents he was going for a walk. They hadn’t objected, merely reminding him not to be late for tea because they had packing up to do before they left the cottage in the morning.
‘You’ve escaped then,’ she said as he sat on a wooden bench overlooking the shingle beach where most of the day-tripping families were beginning to pack up.
She had never spoken to him before except with her eyes as she served their drinks. And he had never known fully what she was saying, only he believed it was that she too was young and understood what it was like to be trapped in adult boredom. There was always secret pleasure in looking at her.
‘We go home tomorrow,’ he said, unsure of what else to say.
‘We get our town back at the end of the summer, not that there’s a lot to get back.’
‘You don’t like living here?’
‘Not really. It’s pretty grim in the winter. I’m going to get out for good as soon as I’m eighteen.’
The rest of the conversation was a blur but he remembered a sense of something shared, something conspiratorially private against the adult world even though she told him his parents were nicer than some of the people she had to serve.
But what was her name? Somehow over the years he had let it slip into confusion, believing it to be one thing before it gradually morphed into another. He has put it somewhere secure for safekeeping and then couldn’t refind it no matter how hard he tried. And what had she looked like? That too had faded with time. Her hair was dark. Her eyes were ... He tried to conjure her again as he had done so often in the previous weeks but she was elusive, shimmering tantalisingly close to the surface of his consciousness before drifting far away again. And yet it wasn’t about her, no matter how precious he held her in his slowly reforming memory. It was about him and what he had felt.
The wooden bench was no longer there, or any others, replaced all along the sea front by slightly curved metal seats and the promenade itself was paved with pink-hued flagstones. He walked past the retired couples sitting staring at the sea, joggers stretching before their run with their legs held taut on the green railing above the beach and a young man with a ponytail vicariously surfing on a scruffy skate board. The holiday homes and former small bungalows that once faced the sea had all gone, replaced by apartments and white-walled glass-fronted houses with cushioned-covered rattan furniture on balconies and viewing decks.
He stopped at where their holiday cottage had been and stared at the high electric gates of a house that looked so pristinely new that it felt as if it had just been unwrapped. He felt disorientated as if the landmarks on which his memory had been built were slowly being erased one by one and the futility of his trip asserted itself again.
Only the beach was unchanged, the light glinting on the familiar shuck of yellow shingle, and as he walked on it for the first time in sixty years he held his face to that same light, watched how it swathed the surface of the water. And he felt too its endless motion, remembered the explanation given to Copperfield that along the coast people’s births and ends were governed by the tides. He stood still, facing the sea and felt the wonder of the boundless. A man alone. The infinite contracted into one human soul. But then he thought of the corrupt and mutating cells gradually usurping his body and knew there was no heavenly afterlife but only the pages on which his life had been printed.
He looked back at the dunes and hesitated, unwilling to suffer the final futility of his journey, his hope eroded just as much as the ravages of time had taken its toll on their contours. A breaking wave laced a filigree of foam close to where he stood and he was conscious of the strengthening wind but he forced himself on, his feet scrunching the shingle.
It was dusk then, a soft light planing the sharp edges of a summer’s day. This must have been where she brought him. Somewhere in these dunes between the shore and the road, somewhere apart from everything that had ever gone before, and much of what was to follow. He stumbled a little in the soft sand as he climbed into a narrow gully that funnelled him off the beach. The effort tired him and finding a hollowed clearing in the sharp-speared grass sat down and pulled up the collar of his coat against the growing cold.
He had never so much as held a girl’s hand apart from when in primary school they had been required to walk in pairs. The utterly compelling mystery of her, the warm hunger and shock of her mouth. Her hair, touched again and again in wonder, his finger lightly tracing the ivory lobe of her ear, the nape of her neck, wondering if the moment like some mirage would splinter into nothingness. Holding another human being in his arms, each sensation new under a strange and secret sky, holding and kissing and nothing more, but everything, everything in that moment with the fierce unmediated flow of life coursing through each waking part of his being, so he too felt sure he would never die.
He looked around him as the sun caught the bleached metal of a beer can partially hidden in the grass, saw the smear of blackened embers where someone had tried to light a fire. Taking off one of his gloves he sifted grains of sand, unexpectedly warm against his skin, listened to the breathless rasp of the sea. A girl no older than he was, whose name he couldn’t remember but whose imprimatur he bore through the long vista of years. He wanted what had been, to quicken him once more so it might carry him through the coming days, even now under this sky that had held him close under its far-off stars. He listened for the heartbeat of the moment, tried to feel again the collision of their breath, but heard only his father’s voice in the distance calling his name, until it too faded, and in its place the ceaseless surrender of the waves to the shore, as all around him the marram grass shivered in the rising wind.
David Park’s latest novel is Spies in Canaan. His previous book, Travelling in a Strange Land, won the Irish Novel of the Year Award. His other works include The Big Snow and The Truth Commissioner