Fire Colour One Page 7

  There were tulips from the garden in a vase by Ernest’s bed. Thurston told me once there was a time centuries ago when tulips were worth more than their weight in gold, when a man would trade one single bulb for his whole house and all of its contents, would risk his life and liberty just to own it.

  “It’s nuts,” he said, “how easily we lose our minds over stuff, how quickly money eats the world up, just like fire.”

  I thought about fire eating up Ernest’s house, the heavy dark furniture and the curtains and the paintings and the dust. I thought about a bright flame wiping it clean and then I realised he was talking to me.

  “It’s all yours,” he was saying. “All of it. It’s all for you.”

  “Are we talking about money?” I said, and he looked kind of guilty.

  “I’m not interested in money,” I told him. “It’s not why I came. I keep telling everyone that.”

  “Why did you come?” Ernest asked and I told him the truth.

  “My mother made me. I didn’t have a choice.”

  I heard something in the hall. Someone was outside the door listening, and I knew who it was. I could hear her breathing. It pulled at my skin like goose bumps, the quiet sound Hannah made, trying to make no sound at all.

  Ernest heard it too, I was sure of it, but he carried on, louder than before.

  “Not money, paintings. And the house, of course. I’d like you to have the paintings and the house.”

  “Ernest,” I said, but he didn’t hear me.

  “No death duties,” he said, “no stealth taxes. Everything is in a trust for when you’re eighteen. I’ve only been looking after it.”

  I got up and opened the door. I could smell her perfume. I could hear her bare feet, soft on the boards of the hall. I knew she’d just been there. I knew she’d heard.

  “Hannah wants your money,” I said. “Not me.”

  He looked at me then like he was seeing me for the first time, like he hadn’t really looked at me before.

  “I’ve never loved anybody the way I loved you,” he said, and it shocked me, the way he just came out with it. It made me want to curl up in a tight ball, like a louse. It made me want to hide. My face was hot like an ember.

  “I don’t think I believe you,” I said.

  He looked angry and frail. “I haven’t done it well. I’ve failed, and it’s been an exhausting, vicious, lonely, overwhelming thing.”

  I didn’t want to feel sorry for him but I did and it made me kind of furious. “I can’t do this,” I said, and I pulled my hand free of his and I got up to go.

  “Do you remember anything,” he said, “about me?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got me all wrong, Iris.”

  “No, Ernest, I haven’t got you at all.”

  It was the middle of the night, for God’s sake. I was tired and all I wanted to do was be somewhere else and be with Thurston. I wasn’t ready for this. I hadn’t asked for any of it.

  “Lies,” he said. “So many damn lies. I just want you to know the truth. I just need you to listen.”

  “OK,” I said, but I stayed where I was, by the door, watching. “So tell me about you and my mum. Why were you ever together? How the hell did that happen in the first place?”

  Ernest tripped on a paving stone. He fell like a tree right in front of my mother in an Oxford side street. He fell, and the skin on his nose hit something sharp and burst right open. He said there was a lot of blood. Hannah helped him to sit up with his back against the window of an antique shop, his legs out in front of him on the pavement.

  “That surprises me,” I said. “The Hannah Baxter I know and love would have walked straight past you.”

  Ernest’s eyes were glazed and exhausted. “Perhaps she hadn’t turned into her yet.”

  He said it took him a minute to remember the rumpled suit trousers and the scuffed brogues he was looking at were his. There was a fine set of wine glasses in the window behind him, fanciful and delicate, with slender glass ladies for stems. They might have been dancing around his head like fairies, like stars in a cartoon. He said that’s what it must have looked like to her. He turned to see what she could see, the blood still welling from the bridge of his nose.

  “Handmade,” he said through his darkening hand-kerchief. “1920s. Probably French.”

  Hannah smiled. “I’m sure I would drop one.”

  “Pretty pricey. Couple of hundred quid a pop.”

  “I could live on that for a month.”

  My mother’s eyes were the colour of sand and envelopes, Ernest said. She was bundled up against the cold, a scarf over her mouth and chin, a hat pulled down low, an oversized coat. He couldn’t see anything of her at first but her brown-paper eyes and her thin, pale hands.

  Thurston showed me some photos a while ago, extreme close-ups of the human eye. They were like the surface of planets, those pictures, like whole worlds and the skin of rope and the mouths of volcanoes. I know the colour of my mother’s eyes. They would have looked like deserts, sand dunes caving in on themselves in ceaseless winds. Ernest said he would have been happy to wander in them forever. I said her eyes were about as hospitable as a desert too, and he wouldn’t have wandered happily for long without water, or a camel, or someone to save him.

  When the ambulance came up the street for him, Ernest was embarrassed. He didn’t want any fuss. He wanted to know who’d called for one, but they wouldn’t say. He felt horribly visible. He knew people were watching from behind their curtains.

  “Would you take me home?” he asked her.

  “I can’t,” Hannah shook her head. He saw that her coat was stained and worn thin at the elbows. Her mouth was as pale as her skin. “I don’t have a car.”

  “You could drive mine.” He patted his bruised face. It was beginning to swell. “I’m having trouble seeing past my own nose.”

  He didn’t tell her that home was almost two hours away. He wasn’t ready for her to say no. One of the paramedics asked Hannah if she was responsible for him and so Ernest answered for her. He said that she was.

  “It was my doing,” he told me, “all of it.”

  They walked slowly to his 1946 Bentley, iron grey, sleek as a cat. She was taller than him, and thin as a rake. When he put his hand on her back to show her the way, he could feel the hard knuckles of her spine. He said Hannah raised her eyebrows at the car. She ran her fingers along its flanks like it was a living thing. Before she tried to start the engine, she took off her hat. Her long dark hair filled the car with its scent and made him dizzy. There were holes in her clothes, some badly mended, some not. She wore no make-up. She gripped the steering wheel until the bones in her hands showed white.

  “It doesn’t sound like her at all,” I said.

  “She was different then,” he told me. “She had nothing to lose.”

  Ernest asked Hannah to tell him something about herself. She said there was nothing to tell.

  “Where do you live?” he said.

  “Other people’s sofas.”

  “What do you do?” he said, and she shrugged instead of answering. The silence wasn’t something she felt obliged to fill.

  She crossed and uncrossed her long legs. Ernest said he tried his best not to look at them. He’d been to the Ashmolean Museum to see the world’s largest collection of Raphael drawings. He’d traced each line of each drawing in his mind, from one end to the other, but he couldn’t reach his usual hypnotic state. Other people kept breaking his concentration. Students and couples and pensioners, having a day out, lost in conversation, just glancing at the art. Now here he was in a trance, in his own car, with this lean girl and her long limbs, fluid as a Boldini portrait, and her eyes on him while he waited for her to speak.

  Hannah wound down her window and let in the winter air. The wind was blowing in from the Arctic, the weather people had said. It had passed through Svalbard and Norway and the Faroe Islands on its way to them in their dot on the landscape, that parking space.
That’s all Ernest could think about, that and her legs and her hair.

  She started the thing first time. “Where to?”

  “It’s a long way,” he confessed. “It’s this side of a hundred miles.”

  Hannah smiled. “Will you buy me lunch?” she said, and he nodded.

  “If you like.”

  “I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

  They stopped at a pub and she ate like she hadn’t eaten in a while, like she wasn’t sure where her next meal was coming from. She was starving, he realised. And after she’d eaten, he drove so she could sleep, and he tried to keep his eyes on the road.

  At the house, he showed her around. He pulled out all the stops: his dad’s vintage cars, his art collection. My mother took it all in.

  “This has got to be worth millions,” she cooed, putting her perfect upturned nose against the cold skin of a Picasso Blue Nude.

  She spent the night in one of the guest rooms. It hadn’t been slept in for years. They uncovered the antique rosewood furniture, the bed and chest and dressing table. The air swam with dust that gathered in the space around them like plankton around whales. Ernest had a sneezing fit and the skin on his nose broke open and bled again. He sat in a delicate, high-backed chair and pressed the wound shut while Hannah put fresh sheets on the bed.

  In the morning, half asleep, he strolled into the kitchen in his pyjamas as usual. Hannah was standing at the door with her back to him, looking out over the frosty garden. Ernest could feel the heat coming off her from twenty feet away. The sky was grey and it seemed to him that there was no sign of life out there, nothing at all, except for her. He asked her to stay. He said it out loud before he could think his way out of it. He was tired of being alone. He wanted to live a little, like Margot had told him. My mother smiled. He expected her to decline politely, to ask him to call her a cab, but she didn’t.

  She was twenty-one and he was her ticket out of nowhere.

  Thurston is twenty-one now too. I missed his birthday. He must have thought my heart was a piece of flint, a small sharp scrap of cold stone. He helped me make a timeline once of things achieved by people at different ages. I know twenty-one off by heart. When he was twenty-one, Arthur Rimbaud abandoned poetry forever. Billy the Kid was shot dead at the OK Corral. Sylvia Plath made her first suicide attempt, stealing her mother’s pills and lying in the crawl space under the house for three whole days before she was found.

  Ernest was thirty-three. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Women at thirty-three. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his essay “Nature”, encouraging us to see the miraculous in the everyday. Ernest saw the miraculous in my mother, or at least he thought he did. Proof again, I suppose, that we see what we want to see, regardless of what we are actually looking at, nothing at all to do with the truth.

  Hannah never collected her things. Ernest didn’t even know if she had any. He didn’t meet anyone from her life before, not at the beginning. She started from scratch, like she was brand-new. He had the antique shop in Oxford send the set of glasses, special delivery. Hannah opened the parcel and kissed him. Then she dropped one on the flagstone floor of the kitchen.

  “She did it on purpose,” he told me, “because they were hers now, because she could.”

  Ernest didn’t have much time left, but he seemed to have time enough for me. I didn’t mind when he thought I was his sister, and at some point I stopped minding that this was all about dealing with his own guilt. I stopped minding and I started to enjoy it while it lasted. He was pretty good company, even when he slipped away on the pain meds and you almost lost him. Even then he had stuff to say that I was interested in hearing.

  He slept a lot. And then sometimes he was clearer than others, all there in the room, wide awake and pin sharp, like none of him was sick or weak or missing. He looked out of his big picture windows, like giant screens where he got to watch live footage of the world. The pale backs of leaves dancing in the last of the sun, the quick fact of a bird on the ledge, low planes overhead, the turned earth in furrowed lines in the fields beyond the garden. Ordinary things, I suppose, but not if you were Ernest, and time was running out, and you didn’t know how many chances you’d get to see those things again.

  I told him that soon we’d all be able to choose the view from our houses. Soon, our windows would open on to all possible virtual worlds and we’d move ourselves from desert island to mountain-top to outer space at the touch of a button.

  “And how will we do that?” he said.

  “Nano-transformational technology,” I said. “Holograms, I suppose.”

  “Really?” he said. “In your lifetime?”

  “It won’t be long,” I told him. “Our cars will look like limousines to us if we want them to, a new model, a different colour every day. Our roads will be empty, sunlit highways, whatever it is we are driving on, whatever jalopy we drive.”

  “How so?” he said, and I liked the way he said it. It made me smile.

  “Three-dimensional projections,” I said. “Hyper-real, interactive illusions.”

  “Fakes?” he said and he laughed.

  “Yes, fakes,” I said. “The real won’t be real enough any more. Only appearances will count.”

  “Imagine that,” he said. “Hannah and Lowell will fit right in.”

  “Children will be born,” I told him, “who’ll have no idea that the holograms aren’t real because the holograms will be real, to them. In the end, everyone who remembers a time without them will be dead.”

  “And what use are the dead to the living?” said Ernest. “They don’t even speak the same language.”

  “You talk to Margot often enough,” I said.

  “Do I?” He looked surprised. “Must be because I’m nearly there.”

  Ernest knew he wouldn’t be around to see it happen. He’d lived through the beginning of a revolution but he wouldn’t see the end. He said he’d try not to judge.

  “I’ve performed my fair share of illusions,” he said, “after all.”

  Still, if he looked out at the night sky through his window and compared it to some future virtual digital recording of the night sky through his window, he wasn’t all that sorry to be going.

  “In the face of all this mastery of wonder,” he said, “I long to rise and glide out, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, to wander off by myself, and from time to time look up in perfect silence at the stars.”

  “Walt Whitman?” I said.

  “Yes. Read him. Read him soon, before I’m gone and the nano-transformers have taken over. Read him in a real-life, actual, rare as hen’s teeth book.”

  He was quiet for a while and I sort of knew what he was thinking so I told him about a thing Thurston and I used to do, a when-I’m-dead game. Thurston started it one night, out of nowhere, when we were out walking.

  “When I’m dead,” he said, “I’m going to become the skin of an antler, the root of a tooth.”

  “Can I be an oyster shell?” I said. “The very tip of a tree?”

  “We can be anything,” Thurston said. “If the mass of the Universe never changes, we have to be some part of it when we die.”

  “Not stars,” I said. “Let’s not be stars. Let’s be paper and subway trains and honey.”

  “Let’s be children’s shoes and paintbrushes and lint.”

  “When I’m dead,” he said, “I’m going to take up smoking.”

  I smiled. “I suppose it can’t hurt.”

  “I’ll drive too fast and jump out of aeroplanes and eat blowfish and toadstools and beach apples. I’ll do my best to drink too much and never ever look before I cross the road.”

  I joined in. “When I’m dead I’ll wear highly flammable clothing and live in a volcano and jump off high buildings and walk across waterfalls on a tightrope.”

  “We’ll be fearless skydivers.”

  “And swim in shark-infested waters.”

  “I might join an expedition to the North Pole in a T-shirt.�
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  “I’ll join a circus and team up with a blind knife thrower.”

  “I’m almost looking forward to it,” Thurston said.

  “Don’t say that,” I told him. “You don’t mean that.”

  When I told Ernest to give it a go, he looked at me for a minute.

  “When I’m dead, I will probably sit at my kitchen table with an infinite pack of my old French cigarettes and watch you, whatever it is you’re doing.”

  I laughed. “That’s it?” I said. “A whole world of possibilities and you want to stay here and look at me?”

  “Do you think you’ll know if I’m here?” Ernest said. “Maybe you’ll smell my tobacco. It’s strangely delicious, like burnt leaves and dung.”

  “Nice.”

  “If you do, you must look over. You have to say hello.”

  “What will you say?”

  “Oh, nothing much. I’ll complain about the lack of good brandy in paradise.”

  “Paradise? Is that where you’re going? Are you sure about that?”

  “My wings are still small,” he said, smiling and shifting in the bed. “They feel like fists under my skin. They’re not ready yet, but they’re coming.”

  Then he asked me if I’d stay here, after he was gone.

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “You can do what you want. Sell the place.”

  “I won’t sell your house, Ernest.”

  “Your house.”

  “Whatever,” I told him. “I don’t know yet. But I do like it here.”

  I hadn’t thought about what would happen when he was gone. I said so.

  “Well you need to,” he said. “That’s what’s happening. I’m going.”

  “I know,” I said. “You’re going. I get it.”

  Ernest sighed. “And you only just got here.”

  He’d patrol the grounds while I slept, he said, and check the locks and passages and stairwells for other ghosts and intruders. He’d sit high in the branches of a tree and listen to the night birds, and the cars that sounded as they passed like waves on a beach, coming in close and then falling away.