I thought of Marcus, dancing across the globe in the grip of some unruly tune from which he can’t escape. It doesn’t take much these days, to bring Marcus to mind. In recent nights he has been a constant trespasser on my thoughts. Pressed like an exhausted summer flower, between images of Hannah and Emmeline and Riverton: my grandson. Out of time and out of place. One moment a small boy with dewy skin and wide eyes, the next a grown man, hollowed by love and its loss.
I want to see his face again. Touch it. His lovely, familiar face, etched as all faces are by the efficient hands of history. Coloured with ancestors and a past he knows little about.
He will return one day, of that I’ve little doubt, for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children. But whether tomorrow or years from now, I cannot guess. And I haven’t time to wait. I find myself in time’s cold waiting room, shivering as ancient ghosts and echoing voices recede.
That is why I’ve decided to make him a tape. Maybe more than one. I am going to tell him a secret, an old secret, long kept. Something no one knows but me.
Initially I thought to write, but having found a ream of yellowed notepaper and a black biro, my fingers failed me. Willing but useless collaborators, capable only of transmuting my thoughts into illegible spidery scrawl.
It was Sylvia who made me think of a tape-recorder. She came across my note paper during one of her occasional cleaning sprees, timed to avoid the demands of an unfavoured patient.
‘Been drawing, have you?’ She’d said, holding the note paper aloft, turning it sideways and inclining her head. ‘Very modern. Quite nice. What’s it supposed to be?’
‘A letter,’ I said.
It was then she told me about Bertie Sinclair’s method of recording and receiving letters to play on his cassette machine. ‘And I don’t mind saying he’s been much easier since. Less demanding. If he starts complaining about his lumbago I only have to plug him in, set him off listening to one of his tapes, and he’s happy as a lark.’
I sat on the bus seat, turning the parcel over in my hands, thrilling at the possibilities. I would start as soon as I got home.
Ruth waved at me from across the street, smiled a grim smile and started across the pedestrian strip, tucking a pharmacy package into her handbag. ‘Mum,’ she scolded as she drew near. ‘What are you doing out here in the cold?’ She looked quickly from side to side. ‘People will think I made you wait out here.’ She scooped me up and led me back along the street to her car, my soft-soled shoes silent beside her tapping court heels.
On the drive back to Heathview I watched out the window as street upon street of grey-stone cottages slipped past. In one of them, midway along, nestled quietly between two identical others, is the house in which I was born. I glanced at Ruth, but if she noticed she did not say. No reason she should, of course. We pass that way each Sunday.
As we wove along the narrow road and village became countryside, I held my breath-just a little-the way I always do.
Just beyond Bridge Road we turned a corner, and there it was. The entrance to Riverton. The lace-winged gates, as tall as lampposts, doorway to the whispering tunnel of ancient trees. The gates have been painted white, no longer the gleaming silver of yesteryear. There is a sign affixed now, alongside the cast-iron curls that spell ‘Riverton’. It reads:
The tape-recording took a little practice. Sylvia, thankfully, was on hand to help. She held the machine before my mouth and I spoke, at her behest, the first thing that came to mind. ‘Hello… hello. This is Grace Bradley speaking… Testing. One. Two. Three.’
Sylvia withdrew the walkman and grinned, ‘Very professional.’ She pressed a button and there came a whirring. ‘I’m just rewinding so we can hear it back.’
There was a click as the tape returned to its start. She pressed ‘play’ and we both waited.
It was the voice of age: faint, worn, almost invisible. A pale ribbon, frayed so that only brittle silver threads survive. Only the merest flecks of me, my real voice, the one I hear in my head and in my dreams.
‘Great,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Sing out if you need me.’
She made to leave and I was beset, suddenly, by a sense of nervous expectation.
‘Sylvia-’
She turned. ‘What is it, darl?’
‘What will I say?’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ She laughed. ‘Pretend he’s sitting here with you. Just tell him what’s on your mind.’
And that is what I did, Marcus. I imagined you on the end of my bed, stretched across my feet as you liked to lie when you were little, and I began to speak. I told you some of what I’ve been doing, about the film and Ursula. I treaded cautiously about your mother, saying only that she misses you. That she longs to see you.
And I told you about the memories I’ve been having. Not all of them; I have a purpose and it isn’t to bore you with tales from my past. Rather I told you about the curious sensation that they are becoming more real to me than my life. The way I slip away without warning, am disappointed when I open my eyes to see that I am back in 1999; the way the fabric of time is changing, and I am beginning to feel at home in the past and a visitor to this strange and blanched experience we agree to call the present.
A funny feeling, to sit, alone in one’s room, and talk to a small black box. At first I whispered, concerned that the others would hear. That my voice and its secrets would drift down the corridor to the morning room, like a ship’s horn floating forlornly into a foreign port. But when Matron popped in with my tablets, her look of surprise set my mind at ease.
She has gone now. The pills I have put on the windowsill beside me. I will take them later, but for now I need to be clear-headed.
I am watching the sun set over the heath. I like to follow its path as it slips silently behind the far-off band of trees. Today I blink and miss its last farewell. When my eyes open, the ultimate moment has passed and the shimmering crescent has disappeared, leaving the sky bereft: a clear, cold blue, lacerated by streaks of frosty white. The heath itself shivers in the sudden shadow, and in the distance a train sneaks through the valley fog, electric brakes moaning as it turns toward the village. I glance at my wall clock. It is the six o’clock train, filled with people returning from work in Chelmsford and Brentwood and even London.
I see the station in my mind. Not as it is, perhaps, but as it was. The big round station clock suspended over the platform, its steadfast face and diligent hands a stern reminder that time and the trains wait for no man. It has probably been replaced now with a blank, blinking digital device. I wouldn’t know. It has been a long time since I visited the station.
I see it as it was the morning we waved Alfred off to war. Strings of paper triangles, red and blue, flirting with the breeze, children racing up and down, weaving in and out, blowing tin whistles and waving Union Jacks. Young men-such
But enough of that. I jump too far ahead.
‘The lamps are going out all over Europe.
We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’
3 AUGUST 1914
