Weaveworld

2

Brendan, for his part, continued to continue. As the weeks passed, Geraldine managed to talk him into joining them downstairs, but he was interested in little but tea and television, and his conversation was now scarcely more than grunts. Sometimes Cal would watch Brendan’s face as he sat slumped in front of the television – his expression unchanging whether the screen offered pundits or comedians – and wondered what had happened to the man he’d known. Was the old Brendan still in hiding somewhere, behind those addled eyes?, or had he been an illusion all along, a son’s dream of his father’s permanence which, like the letter from Eileen, had simply evaporated? Perhaps it was for the best, he thought, that Brendan was shielded from his pain, then drew himself up short at such a thought. Wasn’t that what they said as the coffin was marched past: it was all for the best? Brendan wasn’t dead yet.

As time went by, Geraldine’s presence began to prove as comforting to Cal as to the old man. Her smiles were the brightest thing those dismal months could boast. She came and went, more indispensable by the day, until, in the first week of December, she suggested it might be more convenient all round if she slept at the house. It was a perfectly natural progression.

‘I don’t want to marry you,’ she told him quite plainly. The sorry spectacle of Theresa’s marriage – five months old and already rocky – had confirmed her worst suspicions of matrimony. ‘I did want to marry you once,’ she said. ‘But now I’m happy just to be with you.’

She proved easy company; down-to-earth, unsentimental: as much companion as lover. She it was who made certain the bills were paid on time, and saw that there was tea in the caddy. She it was too who suggested that Cal sell the pigeons.

‘Your father doesn’t show any interest in them any longer,’ she said on more than one occasion. ‘He wouldn’t even notice if they were gone.’

That was certainly true. But Cal refused to contemplate the sale. Come spring and the fine weather his father might well show fresh interest in the birds.

‘You know that’s not true,’ she’d tell him when he put this point. ‘Why do you want to keep them so much? They’re just a burden.’ Then she’d let the subject drop for a few days, only to raise it again when a cue was presented.

History was repeating itself. Often in the course of these exchanges, which gradually became more heated. Cal could hear echoes of his mother and father: the same routes were being trodden afresh. And, like his father, Cal – though malleable on almost every other issue – was immovable on this. He would not sell the birds.

The real reason for his bullishness was not, of course, hope of Brendan’s rehabilitation, but the fact that the birds were his last concrete link with the events of the previous summer.

In the weeks after Suzanna’s disappearance he’d bought a dozen newspapers a day, scanning each page for some report of her, or the carpet, or Shadwell. But there was nothing, and eventually – unable to bear the daily disappointment – he’d stopped looking. Nor was there any further visit from Hobart or his men – which was in its way bad news. He, Cal, had become an irrelevancy. The story, if it was still being written, was running on without him.

He became so frightened he’d forget the Fugue that he took the risk of writing down all that he could remember of the night there, which, when he set himself to the task, was depressingly little. He wrote the names down too: Lemuel Lo; Apolline Dubois; Frederick Cammell …; set them all down at the back of his diary, in the section reserved for telephone numbers, except that there were no numbers for these people; nor addresses either. Just uncommon names to which he was less and less able to attach faces.