‘Yes, I know. We have to ask him. Iestyn Probert. That’s quite a common name. They might have executed more than one. Maybe he’s forgotten.’
‘I’m sure he will remember the Iestyn Probert who took part in the raid on the Coliseum cinema; everyone else seems to.’
‘I’ll let the doctor know you are here,’ said Mrs Lewis, his housekeeper, from the doorway.
The gloom in the sitting room was as palpable as plasticine; you felt you could grab it from the air and mould it into shapes. Heavy velvet curtains, kept in check by sashes of braided gold, hung from curtain rails; closely packed lumps of mahogany furniture pressed down on the spirit; a grandfather clock stood sentinel and delivered tocks like water dropping in a cave. The tops of all the chests and cabinets were arranged with black-and-white photos, pictures of frozen happiness from the ’50s. A car, an Austin perhaps, with shiny chrome trim, amid the tufts of marram grass overlooking a beach. Caravans were discarded on the dunes like children’s blocks; a woman in a headscarf and sunglasses sat amid a picnic and gazed at the camera; from her expression, the mixture of tenderness and gentle reproach, it was possible to imagine the photographer peering inexpertly into the viewfinder of a Rolleiflex camera, giving instructions. Who was she?
‘You promise we’re going to see the farmer who saw the flying saucer after this,’ said Calamity.
‘I promise, even though I would like to put it on record that I think it’s an unpromising avenue of inquiry, although not as unpromising as advertising a black 1948 Buick in the
‘It’s a ’47, not a ’48.’
Mrs Lewis showed us up. The door was ajar at the top of the stairs and darkness seeped out, perfumed with the faint smell of formaldehyde that clings to the lives of old doctors. We walked in; there was a rustle of sheet; two ferret-bright eyes shone from amid the shadows.
‘Good morning,’ he whispered.
‘We’re sorry to disturb you . . .’ I began.
‘I wasn’t doing anything – apart from dying. Come into the light. It’s nice to see you whoever you are. I don’t get many patients these days; they don’t like my bedside manner. Isn’t that what they told you?’
‘They told us you were a fine doctor,’ I said.
‘They told you I was an awful doctor.’ He put on a cartoon voice: “
‘You told a little boy he was dying?’ asked Calamity.
‘I tell all my patients they are dying; it’s the only diagnosis I can make with any certainty. You’d think they would be grateful. Set against the implacable fact of their mortality, what does a cold or case of tonsillitis matter? It’s all too trivial for words.’
‘Ultimately, yes,’ I said. ‘But it’s not trivial at the time.’
‘Tell me, do you follow the latest scientific developments?’
‘Not too closely.’
‘Just as well; you’d stick a paperknife into your heart if you did.’ He raised a feeble finger and pointed at Calamity. ‘Tell me, little girl, do you like flowers?’
‘They’re OK.’
‘Of course you do. You like bright colours, too, eh? All little girls do –’
‘She’s not so little.’
‘The soft peacock of the hills and sky; the deep, coagulated carmine of the rose; the custardy yellow of the daisy’s face, fringed with those perfect spears of white that yet somehow contain within their lucence a hint of the sky’s azure . . . You like colours, don’t you?’
‘Maybe.’
‘They are lies, all lies. Tricks and falsehoods, more deceiving than a lover’s tongue.’
‘I don’t believe you. How can colours be lies?’
‘Because you see, little girl, they are not properties belonging to the things we see, not intrinsically; they are fictions invented in our own heads. Yes, there is no doubt of it. Outside our bodies, beyond our skin, there is just electromagnetic radiation – radio waves that have no brightness nor colour. Ask yourself, where are these colours? If you chase them down the rabbit hole of the eyes, along the paths of nerves to their home in that porridge we call the mind, what do you find? Nothing but palpitating lumps of goo and slime.’ He swept his arm up and pointed through the window to his garden and, beyond it, the universe. ‘Everything we love about this world, all the beautiful things, are fictions our mind invents to conceal from us the insupportable truth: that the world is a colourless, seething quantum soup wrapped in endless night. Tree and flowers are just outlines we draw on to the darkness.’
‘If I felt like that I would find it hard to get out of bed in the morning,’ I said.
‘Do you think staying in bed would change anything? Mrs Lewis tells me you want to know about Iestyn Probert.’
‘You remember the case?’
‘Vaguely. He was lucky enough to be hanged young.’
‘Most people wouldn’t call it lucky.’
‘Of course not, but most people are fools who are scared of the dark and so persuade themselves that this torrent of empty days that we call life is preferable to the darkness that awaits them.’
‘We heard you certified his . . . er . . .’ Calamity paused.
‘Death? Can’t you say it? Are you frightened of a word? You poor, feeble, mouse-hearted things. Death is our friend, the only friend who keeps his appointment, who never lets us down. Death the lover who never forgets our birthday, who never jilts us for another, gentle death . . .’
‘Have you always been so unhappy?’ asked Calamity.
‘What makes you think I am unhappy?’
‘You hate flowers.’
‘No, you are wrong. I don’t. There is nothing to hate. It is not the flower’s fault. A flower has no intention, no more than a rock has. A flower is just a little machine that blind chance over endless geological epochs has contrived into an arrangement that produces copies of itself. What is there to hate? The only hateful thing is the myth of the flower that we create for ourselves.’
‘But have you always felt like that?’
He made a bitter smile and paused. ‘No, there was a time when I loved flowers too, when the colours of which we spoke brought the same uncomplicated joy to me as to the rest of my fellow herd.’ He reached across and picked up a photo from the bedside cabinet. ‘I keep a picture of Rhiannon to remind me of my conversion from that happy state. She left me, you see, when the world was young and we bestrode the sun-burned dunes like gods. We were betrothed and thus immortal like all young people, invincible, at least for an hour. She left me at the acme of my earthly bliss, beached on an Ararat of woe.’
‘Why did she leave?’ asked Calamity.
‘Who knows? They never tell you the true reason, do they? They think they want to spare you, but really they want to spare themselves. Suffice to say, for a season we played in our own walled garden of delight, and then autumn came and she was gone. Anon, the park keeper locked the gate and melted down the key.’ The muscles of his shoulders relaxed, he exhaled slowly, as if released from the grip of the memory. ‘Iestyn was nothing. A cheap crook who pulled off a cheap raid on a cheap fleapit of a cinema and somehow stupidly contrived to kill the poor policeman who gave chase. For this the boy was hanged. He was dead. They generally are once you’ve dropped them from the end of a string.’
Calamity looked disappointed. ‘You couldn’t be mistaken? We heard . . .’
He snorted. ‘You heard? You heard he was still alive? You heard perhaps the story of a strange alien-looking woman who bought his cadaver, paid for it with some antique coin, and lo! a week later, like Jesus, he walked among us again. You prefer such nonsense to the sober, evidence-based professional opinion of the physician who presided at his hanging, who noted, and marked it down on his report, that the fifth cervical vertebra had been snapped by the force of the drop, as indeed was inevitable. This doctor who in all his years never saw or heard of a case in which a hanged man with a broken neck came back to life. What contemptible superstitious nonsense you bring to my bedside.’ He put the photo back and turned it to face away. ‘You are worse than that imbecilic
