Invisible. Jonathan Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ recovers the shape of the Vanwall, its thick blade of a body and the cockpit lodged behind the elongated bonnet, and, from this, momentarily, occurs an evanescent bloom of the Vanwall car’s deep green.

      ‘So, son,’ says his father, fitting another piece of wood to the lathe. ‘They keeping you busy?’ he asks, as if his translations were the benefaction of some charitable committee.

      ‘I’ve plenty of work, Dad, yes.’

      ‘Articles and stuff?’

      ‘That type of thing. Bits and pieces. I’ve a bigger project starting soon,’ he says, meaning the Stadler book, then it occurs to him that he has another book in progress, which it has never seemed appropriate to mention. He waits for another question, but none follows. ‘It should arrive next week.’

      ‘Good,’ says his father.

      ‘A book about someone called Jochen Stadler. A German chap. He went to South America as a missionary, then became an anthropologist-ecologist. He lived in the forest for years, in the Amazon, and married a girl who had looked after him when he was ill. When his wife died he came back to Germany, to his home town, and became a professor at the university, and a politician. His father had been a member of Göring’s staff,’ he perseveres. ‘A forester. Looking after bison in a Polish forest, until the partisans shot him.’

      ‘Had enough of the Nazis by now, I’d have thought.’

      ‘Not quite yet, Dad. Nazis, cooking and gardening – the three guaranteed sellers. Eva Braun’s Kitchen Garden would be a sure-fire hit,’ he jokes, but neither he nor his father laughs. His father is taking a tool from a rack; he hears the slither of steel on oiled stone.

      ‘Hotel’s OK?’ his father asks.

      ‘It’s fine. Very comfortable.’

      Rhythmically the steel grinds against the slickened stone. ‘Your mother can’t see why you’re not staying here,’ his father remarks. ‘She’s put out, you know.’

      ‘But there’s no space, is there, Dad? Unless I’ve missed a room somewhere.’

      ‘As far as she’s concerned there’s plenty of space.’

      ‘And where would that be?’

      ‘I’m not arguing with you. Just telling you what she thinks.’

      ‘And I’ve work to do. There’s nowhere I could work.’

      ‘She thinks there is. Charlotte’s room.’

      ‘Dad, there’s not even a table in Charlotte’s room.’

      ‘The living room, then.’

      ‘It has to be quiet for me to work. I’m fussy. I’m easily aggravated by noise. Honestly, it’s better for everyone if I stay where I am.’

      ‘You know best, son, I’m sure,’ his father concludes, as the lathe begins to spin once more.

      Exploring again the curves and details of the model car, he recalls how, late in the evening, before going to bed, he would go down into the cellar of the old house, where his father would be working. He would walk towards the ball of light and his father would take his hand to guide him to the stool. A sheet of wallpaper, reversed, always covered the bench, and on one part of the paper the husk of the car’s body would be laid. The metallic pieces for the chassis and engine were arrayed around it. Some were so small, like rat’s bones, he had to lower his nose to the paper to see them. His father used needle-thin screwdrivers and delicate little knives and drills that he turned between his finger and thumb. Sometimes it made him think of the hospital, and he would secretly become upset. He liked the names: Studebaker, Hispano-Suiza, Mercedes-Benz, Panhard-Levasseur. They connoted ingenuity and high craftsmanship, and he always enjoyed listening to his father as he worked, extolling a beautiful Ferrari engine, or the functional purity of the 2CV, which could seat two farmers with their hats on, and transport them and their pig over a rutted road, and was so simple a machine that the local blacksmith could repair it, should it ever break down, which it hardly ever would. Through his father’s words he came to share something of his admiration for these cars and their creators, but things changed as his eyesight worsened and it gave him pain to use the immense lens that his father used. So in the evenings he would go to Charlotte’s room and she would read the pages he had to study for homework, while his father worked for hours in the cellar, assembling his little cars. They won prizes, his father’s cars, at events they used to attend together, in high-ceilinged buildings with rough wooden floors and toilets outside. Then one year there was an exhibition, in Bristol, to which his father went without him. Sitting in the living room, with the TV on, they all agreed that it was best if he stayed at home. His mother stroked his hair while his father was speaking, but by then he was beginning to find his father’s hobby ridiculous, which perhaps his parents knew. When this was, exactly, he cannot remember. He must have been thirteen or so, around the time that he became ‘son’ rather than ‘Edward’.

      His father’s appearance in his mind, the last image of him before he became a ghost with his father’s voice, comes from around this time as well. Concentrating, he can see a white shirt and broad brown tie, and an unfocused face with wide sideburns and a drooping moustache. He remembers him smoking a cigarette at his desk, waving an arm as he talked to his secretary, who brought tea for them all. One wall of the office was glazed, and the cars in the showroom on the other side made a pattern of soft rectangles, like an abstract design in stained glass. And his mother: he sees her wearing a yellow jumper, and he can make out her soft, lineless skin and her eyes, which are surprised-looking and very dark. Her feet now drag when she crosses the room, and her cup chatters against the saucer when she sets it down, but her face when he thinks of her is this one, a face that is dissolving year by year but never ageing, fading on the brink of middle age, where she will stay until she dies.

      ‘I’ll let you get on,’ he says.

      ‘OK, son,’ his father replies, stopping the lathe.

      After the evening meal they all go into the living room, for a film-length episode of his parents’ favourite programme. He sits beside his mother on the new settee, which is too large for the room, so whenever anyone opens the door it bangs against the thickly padded arm. There is a new television, which would seem to be as wide as an armchair. The room still bears a smell of new carpet and wallpaper paste and emulsion. Nothing has any familiarity, other than the cushions with the brocade borders. For his benefit his mother provides a commentary on the action. ‘Another body,’ she tells him, at a doomy chord. ‘Killed like the first one – bag over her head.’ Feet sprint heavily on waterlogged grit: ‘Someone’s up to something in the alley.’ From time to time she puts a hand on his; he can sense her turning from the screen to his face. He is waiting for the programme to end, for Charlotte to take him back to the hotel, and he feels ashamed at his irritation with the cadence he hears so often in his mother’s voice, his impatience with her pity for him and for herself. Only by talking can he resist the oppression of her pity, but there is little he can talk to her about, other than the possibility of his leaving the country. He is ashamed of betraying what he thought of his father’s childish hobby, if he did betray what he thought of it. And now he finds himself thinking of the day he left home, the day his father took him to the hall of residence. On the steps they embraced. His father clapped him on the shoulders, then drew him close. Now they shake hands, that’s all.

      ‘Someone’s following the policewoman,’ his mother tells him.

      ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘It’ll be her boyfriend. СКАЧАТЬ