The Lighthouse

CHAPTER SEVEN. Stewed Apples

Futh sleeps badly before waking early, aching and sweating in twisted bedclothes. Getting stiffly out of bed, he finds a radiator blazing despite the hot weather. The small room is stifling. He turns the radiator off and tries to open the French windows but they are locked and there is no key. Taking off his damp pyjamas, he gets back into bed. He is unused to sleeping naked. He remembers how naked he felt the first time he went back to Angela’s house and slept there without his pyjamas.

He had been in a bar. It was some months since he had seen Angela, since she had given him the lift home from the motorway service station. He had arrived at the bar with some people from work but they had all gone and he was alone with a woman. They were sitting on a very soft sofa which he found difficult to get out of. The soles of his shoes were stuck to the tacky floor. She was sitting close to him, this woman, leaning against him. She had syrupy gloss on her lips and glitter glue on her oily skin. Beneath the studs sparkling in her ear lobes, there were scars suggestive of earrings having been torn out.

‘You’re young,’ she said. He was thirty. ‘And you’re not married? I usually meet married men.’

‘No,’ he said, finishing his drink and reaching forward to put the empty cocktail glass down on the glass table in front of them, ‘I’m not married.’

‘You need another drink,’ she said.

Struggling to his feet, Futh went to fetch another round, but before he reached the bar he was surprised by the sight of Angela breaking away from a small group of people and crossing the room towards him.

‘I know her,’ she said when she reached him. ‘You don’t want to be with her. You don’t want to be here.’ She ushered him towards the exit and he went with her without asking any questions. They were almost at the door when it banged open and a small man darted in, glaring at Futh and Angela as he pushed past them. He made a beeline for the shiny, sticky woman sunk into the soft sofa on the far side of the room, kicking the glass table in front of her as he arrived, making the cocktail glasses jump, and shouting, ‘Where is he? Where the fuck is he?’ But Futh was already halfway through the door. The man began to harass bystanders, who backed away. The woman remained on the sofa sipping her drink and eating crisps.

Futh, outside on the pavement with Angela, his heart racing, said, ‘My jacket’s inside.’ It was lying over the arm of the sofa. There was nothing in the pockets though — his wallet was in his hand — and it was not a cold night. He could still hear the small man shouting. He could hear things breaking.

‘You’d better go,’ said Angela.

‘You’d better come with me,’ said Futh as the fighting grew louder, moving closer.

‘You could come back to my house,’ said Angela.

Futh, remembering that Angela lived with her mother, said, ‘I’d like that. I’d like to meet your mother.’

‘She’ll have taken her sleeping pill by now,’ said Angela. ‘She’ll be out like a light until morning.’

People had started spilling out of the doors, escaping up and down the street, dispersing in pairs and groups, and Futh and Angela, moving on too now, looked like any other couple walking away.

He wakes again having dreamt about Angela. He knows that he should get up so as not to miss breakfast but he can’t bring himself to move. He lies there naked and dozing and drifting back into his dream, and he is still there when he hears, through his semi-sleep, a knock at the door. He opens his eyes but he is not certain that the knock was at his door or whether there was a knock at all. After only a couple of seconds, he hears the door being unlocked, sees from his bed the door handle turning, the door opening, and then a maid standing in the doorway, stopped in her tracks. Futh raises himself up on his elbows and smiles at her. The maid says nothing but gives him a look which makes him shrink and then she leaves the room, pulling the door to behind her.

He gets up, washes at the sink and then dresses, putting on his shorts and a clean short-sleeved shirt. He goes down to breakfast in his socks, with big plasters over his raw heels. The kitchen is closed but people are still finishing what is already out and Futh helps himself to the scraps. He eats some bread and cheese and pockets a hard-boiled egg in its shell for his lunch.

There are little vases of mixed flowers on each table, and he recognises, amongst other things, violets. He takes one out of his vase and puts it to his nose but he can’t smell anything.

He planted violets in the garden when he and Angela first moved into their house. There was a huge bed of them and yet there was no scent at all.

‘That’s violets for you,’ said Angela. ‘You can’t smell them.’

And so, to show her their scent, to demonstrate that you could smell them, he bought her a set of violet toiletries — bath oil, shampoo, soap, body lotion, eau de toilette. Angela looked at the gifts and said, ‘I’m not your mother.’

At the table next to his, an attractive young woman is sitting alone. It occurs to Futh that at the time of that first trip to Germany, his father would have been about the same age as Futh is now. Futh can’t imagine his newly single father — he can’t imagine himself — in a hotel bar or some other bar or just in passing, starting up a conversation with a strange woman which would lead to his taking her back to his hotel room. What had his father said? My son’s asleep in the bedroom but there’s a bathroom? Futh imagined conducting a conversation with the young woman at the next table. How did one move so quickly from Hello to a hotel bathroom?

He has always courted women slowly, over months, starting with coffee in cafés and walks in the park, moving on to restaurants and art galleries and museums, not that it always got even that far. With Angela it was different. She was the one to take him to bed. After that first time at her mother’s house, she came round to his place and when she arrived he took her coat and offered her a cup of tea and a scone and she rolled her eyes and said, ‘I’m not your mother.’

Occasionally, and always in bed, she would talk about this married man who had been her boyfriend. ‘He’s always under a car or taking something apart,’ she said after asking Futh whether he could look at her car, fix a headlight which wasn’t working, and discovering that he could not. ‘You’re all in your head. He’s more physical. Good with his hands.’ She always talked about him in the present tense.

Futh, coming to the end of his breakfast and glancing again at the young woman sitting at the next table, finds that she has been joined by her rather large boyfriend. Futh finishes and leaves.

He eats his hard-boiled egg in the woods, enjoying the shade. He remembers his father carefully shattering the shell of a boiled egg while he talked about the powder, the egg substitute, which he had been fed as a child. ‘It was OK,’ he said. ‘You make do.’

Futh had been anxious about spending a week with just his father, but, he had thought, how bad could a holiday be? And as it turned out, in spite of the ferry and the women in the hotel bathroom and his father saying, ‘We can do without her,’ and things like that, Futh enjoyed their holiday. Futh — taking an egg from his father and holding it in his hand for a moment to admire its perfection before bringing it to his opening mouth — did not want it to end, did not want to have to go home ever again.

In the months between the decision that he and Angela would separate and his actually moving out, Futh had been visiting the parks and art galleries and museums which the two of them had never in fact been to, keeping out of her way. He visited the aviary, saw the exhibitions, sat in the cafés, and felt very much like his adolescent self on his climbing frame in the dark, putting off the moment when he would have to climb down and go in.

In the meantime, Angela was packing his belongings into self-assembly cardboard boxes, and each time he came home he found more of them stacked up in the spare room in which he had recently been sleeping.

‘Come and keep me company,’ Gloria had said, standing on the other side of the fence in her nightie. She had not brought out the rubbish this time, she had just come out and walked over to where he was sitting on his climbing frame, and Futh wondered how easily she could see him from inside her house. He had thought himself pretty much invisible sitting there in the dark. He wondered if she had noticed him watching her.

Futh tried to decline her invitation, but she lingered, leaning over the fence, cajoling him. Futh was also alone and he’d had no supper. He imagined Gloria putting something nice on the table just for him. Agreeing then to go with her, he climbed down and clambered over the fence, following Gloria over her lawn and into her house.

He sat on a bench at her kitchen table and watched her making drinks — putting ice in two glasses, adding something, a liqueur, which made the ice crack and shift. She brought the glasses to the table and handed him one, sitting down beside him, and Futh moved along the bench, into the corner. He took a sip of his drink and turned his face away towards the open window, through which he could clearly see his climbing frame looming over the little fence, the cloud-blurred moon above it.

On the window ledge, there was a Venus flytrap, its bright red leaves wide open. Gloria, sitting down, seeing him looking at her plant, said, ‘It’s a beauty, isn’t it? Your daddy doesn’t like it but I just love it. It catches every little thing that comes by.’ Futh reached towards it, an outstretched finger poised to poke at a trap, to tickle its trigger hairs, to feel it close around him, and Gloria said, ‘Don’t do that.’ He withdrew his hand, turning back to his drink, trying a little bit more, and Gloria said, ‘It’s caught a moth.’ Futh looked. A trap had closed and there was something inside it, legs and the edges of wings poking out between the cilia. He wondered how it had managed that. He had not looked away for long. He was sorry to have missed it.

Years later, in his twenties, he would visit Japan, and he would see clingfilm-wrapped sea creatures in supermarket refrigerators slowly and uselessly moving their legs, and he would be reminded of the moth in the Venus flytrap in Gloria’s kitchen.

‘What happens now?’ he asked.

‘In a week or so,’ said Gloria, ‘the trap will open again. What’s left will blow away.’

As Futh watched the moth struggling between the plant’s tightly shut leaves, he felt a fingertip touching the back of his neck and the top of his back, underneath his T-shirt. ‘You’ve caught the sun,’ said Gloria. Futh stayed still, looking out at the darkness, feeling the slight weight of her touch on his skin, the warmth of her fingertip, and the line she had traced from the nape of his neck to the top of his spine, and then he heard her doing something on the far side of the kitchen and he realised that she was no longer touching him and probably had not been for a while.

Gloria was fetching more ice — returning to the table with the ice cubes already melting in her hand, water dripping between her fingers — and the bottle of whatever they were drinking. She encouraged Futh to finish the drink in front of him and then refreshed his glass. Sitting down again, she looked at him, cupped his face in her hands, and said, ‘I can see your daddy in you.’ From time to time, while they drank, she patted his knee or stroked his hair. When someone rang the doorbell, Futh jumped. Gloria stood and went to the front door.

Futh could not hear any voices. There was a porch with an internal door which Gloria had perhaps shut before opening the outer door. But he heard heavy footsteps going up the stairs. Gloria came back into the kitchen. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said to Futh. ‘It’s past your bedtime.’ Leaving the kitchen again she said, without turning round, ‘Let yourself out,’ and she switched off the light as she went.

Futh felt a bit sick, like he did on ferries when the crazy carpet was seesawing under his feet. He stood up, holding on to the table, and then sat down again.

Some time later, he was still sitting there in the dark when he heard someone coming down the stairs, down the hallway, towards the kitchen. He expected to see Gloria coming through the doorway and was thrown when instead — smelling the pub before the light snapped on — he saw his father.

His father went to the fridge and took out a bottle of wine, and then opened the cupboard next to it and got out two glasses. Futh pressed his sunburnt back against the wall. His father, without noticing him, left the kitchen again.

Futh listened to his father’s footsteps going up the stairs. He did not move when he heard the creaking of the floorboards overhead, and then the bedsprings, nor when he heard again the floorboards and then footsteps on the stairs and in the hallway.

The kitchen light snapped on again and there was his father going to a drawer by the sink and taking out a bottle opener. And then his father swung round to face Futh at the table, and for a long moment they just looked at one another. His father broke the silence. ‘Go home,’ he said. Futh waited, and his father came a little closer and said, ‘Now.’

Futh stood up, slid along the bench and got himself to the back door. As he stepped off Gloria’s back doorstep, the kitchen light went out and he negotiated the plant pots and the bins in the dark. Climbing over the low fence into his own garden, coming down on the other side, he was sick into the empty flowerbed and onto the pitch-black grass.

His father has always made fun of him for not being able to hold his drink, as if he were not just the same. He ridiculed Futh for not knowing how to drive in his thirties, for still hitchhiking in his forties. When Futh finally took driving lessons and passed his test, his father criticised him for being the kind of driver who did not know the first thing about cars, for running out of petrol and for paying other men even to change a bulb in a headlight. And he mocked him for spending all day long trying to make paper smell like apples. ‘What’s the point of that?’ his father said. ‘You know you can buy actual apples?’ Futh told him about the millions of tiny perfume bottles whose scent would still be there in twenty years. His father said, ‘Real fucking apples. You can eat them.’

Futh’s first memory is of playing under the kitchen table while his mother stewed apples for his dinner. She had the radio on and was humming along while she peeled and cored and chopped the apples and put the pieces in a simmering pan, and the kitchen was full of music and sunlight and the smell of unadulterated apple.

He recalls asking Angela, after they were married, if she could make an apple crumble. Finding her in the kitchen the next day cooking apples, he stood at her shoulder while she worked and he told her about this memory of his mother, how the smell of the apples took him back, and he saw her jaw tighten. The apple crumble came out well, but she did not make it again.

Futh, with sore feet and no need to hurry, arrives at his hotel in the late afternoon. He goes straight up to his room where his suitcase is waiting for him. After showering and taking a nap he goes out again, into the balmy evening, to look around the town before dinner.

Passing a pub with tables on the pavement, he stops and gets himself an unexpectedly huge glass of beer and watches the people walking by. The women his forty-something father brought back to the hotel were young, in their twenties perhaps. But Futh is not looking at the younger women, he is looking at those in their mid-thirties, the age his mother was when she left.

At the age of twelve, he wanted to go to New York as soon as he was old enough. In his twenties, when he could have travelled anywhere he wanted, he visited many cities and countries but he did not go to New York. He told himself that it was because he did not like flying — he generally went on coach tours — but he flew to Tokyo and Montréal. He did not go to New York until he met Angela, who wanted to go there herself.

On the aeroplane, during take-off, he began to imagine vividly there being a fire in the cabin or a terrorist amongst the passengers and being unable to escape. He felt the onset of the anxiety he always feels when flying, and he tried a relaxation technique which he had taught himself from a tape. He looked down at his feet, concentrating on them, breathing slowly and deeply, releasing all the tension in his toes, and in his arches, moving up to his ankles, still breathing slowly and deeply, relaxing his calves and then his knees, breathing slowly and deeply, his thighs… It was dark outside the aeroplane, and some of the passengers were switching off their overhead lights. He concentrated on his abdomen, and on his breathing, beginning to feel heavy, becoming drowsy, and, in the darkening cabin, falling asleep.

He dreamt that he had received a letter from his mother. She had written down her new name and address so that he would be able to find her, but however hard he looked at it he could not read her handwriting.

He opened his eyes with a desperate sense of something vital slipping away from him. Angela, sitting beside him watching a film, told him the new local time. Futh sat rewinding his watch, looking at the hands spinning backwards through the hours until even the date changed.

They went on a tour, on an open-top bus, although the top deck was full so they sat downstairs, people-watching through the windows. Stopped at traffic lights, Futh found himself staring at a woman who was looking in a shop window, whose face he could see reflected in the glass, a striking woman with greying blond hair. Quite slowly, as if she were an animal which might be startled, which might dart away, he got off the bus, approaching and touching her on the arm so that she turned around to look at him. He could not see her eyes through her sunglasses, or any port-wine stain beneath the high neckline of her dress, and she had not spoken before a man interrupted them, asking Futh what he wanted. When Futh failed to reply, the man took the woman’s elbow and steered her away down the street. Futh watched them walking away, and after a while they paused again outside another shop and the man glanced back at Futh and the woman did too, and she took off her sunglasses, but she was too far away now for Futh to see her face clearly. But he had a feeling it was her.

He turned to look at Angela, to gesture through the window of the bus. He wanted to suggest, depending on the look on her face, that they abandon the tour and do the same thing, take a walk down the street, looking at the shop fronts. But Angela was not there. He watched the open-top bus picking up speed on the far side of the junction and disappearing into the distance with Angela on board.

‘I really think it might have been her,’ he said later, back at the hotel, walking down to dinner with Angela. ‘I just had a feeling.’

‘You said the same thing about the woman in Central Park,’ she said. ‘And you had a feeling about the woman in the deli.’

Futh and Angela walked into the hotel dining room, Futh with one hand in his pocket, his fingers wrapped tightly around the little silver lighthouse. He always took the lighthouse with him when he travelled, as if it were his Saint Christopher.

He took it to Germany when he went with his father. It was in his coat pocket when, having given up on the walking, they visited Futh’s Great-Uncle Ernst. Futh had heard his granddad talking about his brother, asking Futh’s father to return to Ernst the silver lighthouse which had been their mother’s. Futh arrived at Ernst’s house with the lighthouse in his kagoul pocket, a secret inner pocket — his father had one in which he kept the passports and Deutschmarks, not trusting the hotel staff.

They did not actually know if Ernst was still alive. If he was, he would be well into his eighties. Nor did they know if he would have remained in his parents’ house, or even if the house was still standing. They did not make contact before going. Their hotel was close enough for a day trip and they went on spec, not really expecting to find Ernst but going anyway, to see what was or was not there.

Arriving at lunchtime, they found the house standing and clearly lived in, well maintained. The road was busy, the only parking space some way from the house. Futh’s father knocked lightly on the front door and then stood back. They waited for what seemed like a long time, noticing the twitching of a net curtain in an upstairs window. They were on the point of turning away and leaving again when the door was finally opened.

Futh was expecting his great-uncle to look like his granddad. Futh had been eight when his granddad died and only remembered him as an ill man, faded and shrunken. But the man who stood in front of them was unexpectedly large and solid.

‘Ernst?’ asked his father, and the man nodded. His father spoke German — a greeting, an introduction — and Ernst, although frowning, stepped away from the door, inviting them inside.

Ernst took their coats, their matching kagouls, and showed them to the living room which was up a flight of stairs. He shooed the cats off the chairs and went to fetch coffee, and a glass of milk for Futh. He was gone for quite a while, and the cats crept out from underneath the furniture, climbing back onto the chairs, settling themselves in the guests’ laps.

Ernst returned, giving Futh his milk and pouring out the coffee and speaking with Futh’s father in German. Futh could not follow the conversation, did not understand much of what was said until afterwards, on the journey home. When Ernst turned to Futh to tell him in German, ‘You look like my brother did at your age,’ Futh looked blank. Ernst said to Futh’s father, ‘Doesn’t he speak German?’ Futh’s father said no, he did not. ‘He should learn German,’ said Ernst.

‘It was your brother,’ said Futh’s father, ‘who said we should come and see you.’

‘Did he give you anything for me?’ asked Ernst.

Futh’s father took a swallow of coffee and said, ‘No.’

Ernst shook his head. ‘I doubt you know,’ he said, ‘the circumstances of his leaving home?’

Futh was looking around the room, taking an interest in the few small photographs displayed on the sideboard, which included one of himself. So, he thought, his granddad had written home, had at least sent pictures, and he was heartened by this because he supposed, therefore, that his mother might too. Looking, though, at the picture of himself, he felt that something was wrong, perhaps his hair. Then he realised his mistake — this was an old photograph, next to which there was a similar portrait of a little boy who was Ernst, and Futh understood that the boy in the first photograph was not himself but his young granddad.

‘There was a girl,’ said Ernst. ‘There was always a girl, he ran from one to another. Well he got this girl into trouble. You know what I mean. He left because he thought he was going to get a beating from her brothers.’

The reason for his leaving was, apparently, no great surprise to his family. The surprise was his theft of his mother’s few valuables. These, in fact, were returned by post soon afterwards, with the exception of a perfume bottle in a silver case.

‘He must have given it,’ said Ernst, ‘to your mother.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Futh’s father. ‘But it was in my father’s possession, intact, in his eighties. It was given to my wife.’

‘It shouldn’t have been,’ said Ernst. ‘That was my mother’s, and mine to inherit. It has value. It ought to be returned.’

An insect crawled over the tabletop towards Ernst who, leaning forward, crushed it carefully with the back of his teaspoon, wiping the spoon on his trouser leg before using it to stir his sugared coffee.

‘My wife and I are separated,’ said Futh’s father. ‘I don’t even have an address for her.’ After a moment he added, ‘The bottle got broken anyhow.’

Ernst sat back in his chair and looked at Futh, watched him drinking his full-fat, room-temperature milk. Futh, looking back at Ernst, was feeling a bit sick. Ernst, turning again to Futh’s father, said, ‘If it can’t be returned, my brother should pay me for it.’

‘I’m afraid your brother died,’ said Futh’s father, ‘a few years ago.’

Ernst took a long look at Futh’s father and then at Futh, perhaps considering whether someone else should be made to pay. He shook his head then and drank his coffee but every time Futh glanced up it seemed that Ernst was looking at him.

After a while, his father put down his empty coffee cup and said, ‘Well, we should get going,’ and he stood so that the cat fell from his lap. Futh, trying to do the same thing but doing it awkwardly, got scratched.

Ernst led the way down the stairs to the front door, on the back of which his visitors’ kagouls were hanging on a hook. He took them down, handing the big one to Futh’s father and the smaller one to Futh, who tried to take it, and Ernst, looking hard at him before letting go, said, ‘You are just like my brother.’

Futh followed his father out onto the street, turning back to wave, to see whether he was still being watched. It seemed a very long way to the car, and the lighthouse, feeling huge now inside the little secret pocket of his kagoul, banged against his chest as he walked.

Futh finishes his second enormous beer and orders another. By the time that is gone, he is feeling pretty drunk. He stands up carefully and steps away from the table and into the street. He walks towards his hotel, trying to hum a tune which was a favourite of his mother’s, but he can’t get it. He concentrates on keeping his feet in the middle of the pavement, but every now and again his right shoulder scrapes against the wall, or the kerb falls away beneath his left foot.

Entering the hotel, he concentrates on walking in a straight line to the bar and then stands there swaying very slightly. There is a smell of damp dishcloths and dry-roasted peanuts which is making him feel ill. He sits down on a stool, thinking that he should have dinner.

He thinks of Angela sitting down to her dinner in their house, the house to which he will not be returning. When he gets back to England he will be moving straight into a flat. All those self-assembly boxes will be there, with all his things inside waiting to be unpacked. Angela will eat in what will now be her home and he will eat in his, and he wonders if they will still retain the habits of their marriage, sitting down to eat at the same time, having their main course at the table and their pudding on the sofa, watching the same television programmes while they eat. He imagines messaging her from his bedroom window — flash-flash-flash — before they each get into their separate beds and go to sleep.

There is a half-drunk beer in front of him. He does not remember buying it or speaking to anyone. He does not appear to have ordered food. He does not even have a menu. No one else is eating and the bar looks like it is closing. He stands up and goes to his room and it occurs to him that he forgot to pay for the beers he had in town.

He goes first to room six, before remembering where he is. Letting himself into his room, he thinks how much he would like a bedtime snack. He used to ask Angela, if he came home hungry after drinking, to make him a sandwich or something, and she used to say, ‘I’m not your mother.’

He puts on his pyjamas and climbs into bed, wishing that there were someone who would bring him a little supper.