Nicholas Royle - Quilt

You encounter, too too late, not only his collected works already scattered but in the deep drawers of the great oak desk and boxes and cases and cabinets the remains of all else, every letter, document and photograph relating to the family, from birth to death certificate, from toddler holiday snaps to terminal correspondence, and of the lives of your father’s father and mother, the last deranging flotsam casting up as from a kaleidoscope of sepia a photograph from Bexhill-on-Sea in full beachwear circa 1920, another of your mother’s grandparents, labourers on the farm in Scotland never before or again to be pictured, circa 1890, another of your mother’s father’s father from the Highland Games even further back, caber-tossingly dark and in the vestiges now yours to keep or consign to the almost daily garden pyre or further trip to the tip. With folders containing heating bills and letters exchanged on the subject of the boiler from a quarter of a century ago, or documentation relating to the extension built and the purchase and sale of the house you had previously all lived in, the bundling up and dispatch is almost automatic, but in the case of more personal relics, however apparently trifling, you can linger and lose all sense of perspective before deciding no, not now, not yet, and returning the folder to its place in the drawer.

It is practically crushing you, this end of the end, the ends altogether, coming together, end upon end of the world of your father and mother and family, house and history to be from now on adrift in your body alone. The end presses your forehead as if it were necessary for material to retreat that can no longer do so, slide away when everything has already gone. You remember a book to which he was strangely attached, called The Hampdenshire Wonder , and find it with surprising speed. You blow the dust off and you laugh. You laugh with your father. You feel his laugh in you. You have never read this book and wonder why. He showed it to you perhaps thirty years ago and you vaguely recall immersing yourself in the opening pages but no further. You wonder what he so liked about it. You connect it with the word ‘hydrocephalic’, which you hear, as you have always done, in the precise humorous intonation of your father.

Watching is also to be watched, the singular oddity of bearing witness to these creatures sometimes buried and virtually out of sight in the substrate, eyes nonetheless kept free, pricked up like cats’ ears, at attention in the quartz sand, again and again picked out after the event the realisation of another creature realising you, and at other times as if electrically surging, a trained-up veritable school of four, unforeseeably together, one by one or in ones and twos, ghost birds flapping up through the water, plapping at the surface and looking, yes, from the wings, in alary formation, indisputably on the watch at you, at where you are if not at you, the body rising through the water seen in its pulsing forcing resurrecting swoop, showing its creamy white underside, the gill slits and mouth organised as a smile returning to the world dolphin-like yet phantasmic, this rearing up of a living white sheet of ventral alien face, then the superbly fickle jilting gesture, surfacing or retreating, the flip and show of the dorsal view, the waving through the water of backs dark and gorgeous spotted, another world of eyes, the ocellate gliding, neither peacock, leopard, butterfly nor chameleon, but motoro , the rays all four the same variant or morph, name unknown. Following the torrid automatism of war in the garden, traipsing your father’s hand-built chicken-wire wheelbarrow full of tinder-dry grass, weeds and hedge-trimmings, like a bier down to the site of the daily fire, and driving out to the municipal tip with yet more filled black bin-liners and objects you can no longer face, sweltering days ending always this pseudo-iterative somnambulism, this delirium between repetition and alteration, in the late afternoon you stop, fetch out a bottle of chilled Aspall cider from the refrigerator, and sit down in your father’s favourite armchair, immersed in the rhythms of coming

and going, rising and falling in the cool shadow-life of the great tank.

There is a new literature. It does something new with people. It has different slownesses and spectralities. It celebrates nanothinking.

There is the lull and leave off, the to you surprising compassion shown by many of the official bodies, not the coroner or registrar or undertaker certainly, but so many mostly unnamed others, representing the utility companies, your father’s bank, local authorities, the pensions company, the tax office, the solicitors entrusted with the original of the will. There is time given. It is a time that never existed before. It is as if your father’s phrase ‘from time to time’, apparently so casual, opens up like a cuckoo clock, intimating a time in between the one and the other, a mad gift. Even your employer proves unexpectedly benign, granting you compassionate leave (officially described as ‘sick’), for as long as, so long as, what does the voice say? You try to recall the manager’s exact words: three months, is it? What does it matter?

You will stay here now in this house with Taylor, Audrey, Hilary and Mallarmé, in need as they after all are of almost constant attention. Really, so much care must be taken: it is a far more onerous task than having children or looking after elderly loved ones. You will watch in this house for as long as it takes.

In the first days after the funeral there are occasional visits or calls from neighbours, further cards of sympathy and calls from family friends. The farmer down the lane offers to help with carting stuff off to the tip and tidying the garden, his wife to collect supplies of food for ‘the fish’, as she insists on calling them, from the city where, some twenty miles off, you have to get such supplies. Someone else, an old friend of your father, calls and tries to put you in touch with another local man who specialises in house-clearance, to move along the business of sorting out the house. You politely decline all these offers, but when the farmer’s wife asks for the second time within that first fortnight when are you going to put the house on the market you struggle to remain courteous. As in the story of the man who cannot go into the street because he is absolutely sure he will kill everyone he meets, you find yourself driven deeper into the solitude that is in any case never yours.

It is while you sit with your Aspall, eyes sunk in the cool shadow-life of the great tank, that you talk to the girl last seen in green shoes. In the calm of water-lights, in this placid lost world of motoro , you drift for hours, telling her what you have been doing and thinking, enabling her to follow your life by telephone. When the conversation ends it is always the same. It is time to feed the rays. You relish the almost dissociated pleasure of seeing them seeing food on offer and rising to the surface accordingly, or remaining oblivious, at a distance, like Auden’s reindeer, altogether elsewhere, picking up a morsel of whitefish, shrimp or piece of cucumber only after it has come to rest on the substrate. It is strangely compelling to observe them eat while being unable to see what it is they are eating, since their eyes are on the other side of their bodies, the sense suggested of a communication between dorsal and ventral not of the order of vision, and the faintly frightening plates of teeth, the closest resemblance the rays have to their cousins the sharks, as they inexorably imperviously grind up their prey living or dead.