Dreams of Speaking Page 12

  When Norah visited, Alice cooked her elaborate Indian meals and they talked together with a new and vigorous energy, as if each otherwise lived in solitary confinement. Norah was impatient to finish school and enter art college. She missed her sister. She asked her to phone more frequently. They talked deep into the night, lingering with pleasure over the restorative anecdote, the casual perception, the trailing conversation, wayward and fortuitous, that led to the genuine intersections and exchanges between them. Alice imagined their voices as silky ribbons, blown out of the window, across roads and roofs, to fly like a gauzy banner above the restless river.

  10

  Let me tell you, wrote Mr Sakamoto, about John Logie Baird, the inventor of television. (An artifice of modernity I confess especially to like, despite the fact that it is without the qualities of nuance and eternity.)

  Another Scotsman of dogged ingenuity and generous humanity, he was born in 1888, the fourth child of Jessie and the Reverend John Baird, in the little town of Helensburgh, just west of Glasgow. From an early age he was accident-prone, and both ill and inventive in full measure. A boy of conspicuous leadership, he devised telephonic communication and electric lighting for his friends, and almost killed himself being launched in a home-made glider from the high gabled roof of his parents’ house. The vehicle broke in half, depositing him, in his own words, ‘with a terrific bump on the lawn’ and left behind a life-long fear of flying.

  He was at first a mediocre student, and studied electrical engineering at technical college, gaining a diploma before he could be admitted to Glasgow University, where, as it happens, he never finished his degree. But already, as a young man, Baird was imagining technologies of vision – imagining reflection, scanning, radar, display. He was already producing the poetically named ‘shadowgraphs’, grey blurry outlines of images on screens. Transmission excited him, focus, clarity. In his small laboratory in Soho, London, he worked with a dummy’s head, sharpening the image, experimenting with photoelectric cells; and then one day, there it was, sure as the nose on his face. Baird ran downstairs, seized an office boy by the elbow, and paid him two shillings and sixpence to stand where the dressmaker’s dummy had stood. So he saw before him, now, a distinctive human face, electrically transmitted. It was 1925. The boy, William Taynton – Bill to his friends – was dematerialised and represented in a stream of light.

  Television was first publicly demonstrated in January 1926. Short of funds, Baird had learned to employ unconventional materials. To create his mechanical scanning device, which required spinning discs, he used several hatboxes mounted on a coffin lid. The images were tiny – no more than visiting-card size – and limited to head and shoulder shots. Even so, it was a marvel. The first television was this contraption of assorted and incongruous objects – like something Marcel Duchamp might construct, like a surrealist object combining, symbolically at least, death and art – and these miniature rectangles, these impossible windows. Who would have foreseen then, in 1926, that impossible seeing would become habitual, domestic, addictive and omnipresent, that it would gain mystifying supremacy and uncontested power, that moon walks, assassinations, cyclones and pop divas would appear in lounge rooms across the globe with a kind of facile unanimity?

  Unlike Bell, Baird did not become a multimillionaire. He held on too long to the model of mechanical vision, only converting to the cathode-ray tube receiver, the future of television, in 1932. He was in relentless dispute with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company and the Bell Telephone Company of America who, with more money, developed his ideas beyond his control. Baird’s technology was also taken up by the state – the BBC. His own early efforts went towards producing cinema television, the broadcast, on a large screen, of celebrities and horse races. The Second World War also halted his research and jeopardised the fortunes of his relatively small company. He died in 1946, mourned by a loving family, but under-recognised for his genius.

  Photographs of John Logie Baird show a remarkably handsome man. But he never looks at the camera. He gazes far away, at a more vigilant lens, one that sees and transports faces with more lavish compulsion, telecasts them dramatically, from aerials and satellites, carries them hither and thither, over vast, vast distances.

  Outside it was raining. The drains thundered and gurgled. The building opposite – offices, Alice supposed – had a slick and darkened appearance, more sombre now since Leo, and the police, and the leaving of flowers. The mini-memorial had disappeared, but Alice was not sure when, or by whom, it had been dismantled. One day she noticed it was no longer there.

  ‘There,’ said Alice, pointing. ‘He was left in that doorway.’

  Mr Sakamoto followed the line of her arm.

  ‘The students don’t congregate here any more. They’ve found a new spot, further up the street. So I no longer see Gisele and Sylvain, Arlette and the others, except in glimpses, from a distance.’

  ‘They needed to move,’ Mr Sakamoto said simply.

  Alice wondered if she did. Every time she stepped outside she still thought: this is where Leo died. This is where a young man living in his headphones, in his own world of sound, was beaten to death in the early evening, with no one noticing. She imagined there was a kind of residue in the air, a trace of wickedness or defilement. She imagined she could smell blood.

  Alice and Mr Sakamoto were sharing coffee in her studio. It was a new stage of friendship, a new form of trust. In the air sounded the soft syncopation of the rain, a sound tender and appropriate to the oblique quality of their feelings.

  Mr Sakamoto looked relaxed and introspective.

  ‘I had a phone call today. From the past. From Clare.’

  Alice could tell he had been waiting to announce this news.

  ‘Clare?’

  ‘The woman I told you about. In the bookshop. In Edinburgh.’

  ‘Ah, that Clare. How many years is it?’

  ‘Actually, I met her again only last year. I was back in Edinburgh, researching Bell. I was working in the Scottish National Library, reading, somewhat laboriously, the curious verses and philosophies of his grandfather, Alexander, and when I raised my face for a break she was standing before me. Apart from her grey hair she looked much the same – still slim and attractive, still slightly Japanese. She wore a maroon velvet jacket and a black woollen scarf, dangling loose, as if she had just come in from the cold outside. We were awkward with each other, unsure what to say. Clare sat in the seat opposite – I think she was sizing me up, wondering what she saw in me all those years ago – and then she suggested we go out for a drink. We talked about old times, our children – she has two, and four grandchildren – she spoke of the death of her husband. I said a little about Mie, not very much, and bragged at length about Akiko and Haruko. We exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, and there was one of those wistful, hesitant moments, just as we parted. I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek; she responded with an embrace.’

  Mr Sakamoto paused.

  ‘That night I dreamed about Mie, and woke myself grieving. I hadn’t dreamed about her for years, not since her death. It was a perplexing thing. Like being hauled backwards. This is one thing I should have learned by now: that grief never finishes … Anyway, Clare rang me early this morning. She must have phoned Haruko – one of the numbers on my card – she had given her the telephone number of my hotel.’

  ‘What did Clare want?’

  ‘It was one of those long-distance calls where the caller speaks too loudly, and cannot settle easily into conversation. In any case, she said she was about to begin travelling and wanted to meet. She said she knew I wouldn’t be in Japan, but was surprised to find me so close – as it were – just across the channel. She’ll be here next week.’

  Alice was waiting, not sure what Mr Sakamoto wanted her to say. They both listened to the rain, which seemed to be easing. Rain is also unmodern, Alice was thinking, so messy, importunate.

  ‘I was going to ask,’ he went on, ‘if you’d hav
e dinner with us. It would make it easier, I think. Less potentially romantic …’

  ‘Ah, so you’re scared of her?’

  ‘Yes. Well, no. I just don’t want her to get the wrong idea …’

  Mr Sakomoto smiled. He looked younger, not dressed in his suit and tie.

  Alice was pleased he had asked for her protection. It was as if they were old friends, as if what lay between them was known, secure. The compact of familiarity, its reassurance.

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ Alice responded.

  Their talk drifted to topics of books and literature. Mr Sakamoto said that reading had saved his life. Not mathematics. Not money. Not travel. Reading. At a time, he said, when he felt blasted by images, words had anchored him, secured him, stopped his free-falling plunge into nowhere.

  Alice bent her head. Mr Sakamoto’s voice was calm and serious. Outside the rain had ceased. The world was shining wet. They would step out together, walk the paved, puddled region along the river, then part, each to their own projects, each back to the silent production of words.

  Alice realised that she and her mother had never spoken. They had talked, of course, traded pragmatic conversation and even pleasurable repartee, but there was no occasion on which they had sat down, woman to woman, and encountered each other in the full density of their fraught relationship. Pat was ashamed of Alice, but Alice was not sure why. There was a fissure, a chasm, that neither could cross. What Alice knew of her mother she had learned from her grandmother, Vera, and from conjecture based on the slightly brown snaps in the family photograph album. Pat had suffered four miscarriages before Alice arrived. There had been this protracted and repeated emptying out, this negative awareness of the body, this expectation of disaster. Vera said that at first Pat had been depressed, but by the fourth pregnancy was in a state of numb resignation. She said nothing of Alice’s birth, or any subsequent rejoicing. Perhaps, Alice reasoned, Pat was by then less interested in babies, cautious and pessimistic. In photographs of Alice’s babyhood she was depicted, disproportionately, in her father’s arms; Pat was the photographer, it seemed. Or she had given over the child, set up a substitute parent, so that any new loss would not destroy her.

  Before her marriage Pat worked in a pharmacy store. She had left school at fifteen to support her widowed mother, and found a position almost immediately at Drakes, in Burt Street. Vera insisted she had tried to persuade her daughter to stay at school – ‘a real bright spark, real brainy, your mum, could’ve done anything’. But Pat was worried about her mother’s inadequate pension and determined to help. She had two younger brothers, Harry and Ted, and both stayed on and completed their schooling.

  Work in the pharmacy suited her. There was the vaguely glamorous aspect to selling cosmetics, which Pat, for whom cinema was a pre-eminent pleasure, adored, and she also learned the rudiments of organic chemistry from her employer, Mr Drake. So she was able to try lipstick samples – she settled on ‘Sunset Rose’, her life-long choice – but also to study, in an ad hoc way, the world of chemical combinations and medicinal advice. She was proud of her work; she felt her knowledge a genuine achievement. Miners’ wives invariably wanted something for coughs, something to counter the wretched dissolution of their husbands’ lungs, but even Pat knew that there were conditions a simple prescription could not alleviate. She watched distraught women leave, clutching their brown paper bags. The new drills in the mine were popularly called ‘widow makers’: they sent tiny blades and splinters of quartz straight into the throat. The unions were agitating; there had never been so much illness.

  By the time Pat met Fred she was desperate for romance. Hollywood had given her an expectation of dramatic interventions and the irresistible swerving of life into the arms of a strong man. She dreamed of slippery satin dresses and kisses accompanied by music. At the Firemen’s Ball Fred was notable for his quiet self-composure. He was not nervously searching the room for a partner, nor did he seem lonely or lacking in confidence. He was also tall, dark and handsome. She heard a man’s voice address him with affection as Blackie. When he walked towards her and asked her to dance, she had already decided: yes, he’s the one.

  They both wanted children. But trying became a series of tragic disappointments and after ten years it seemed almost impossible. Pat gazed at other women’s children and went home to weep. Then there were two babies, in just two years. Alice and Norah were both feisty girls, who fought from the beginning, even as infants. Pat laboured over making them matching frilly outfits and dainty accessories, as if this would somehow guarantee a likeness or accord, but the girls shamed her by their shouting matches and bad behaviour. Alice was mostly to blame, being the oldest. Alice shattered Pat’s image of herself as the mother of pretty, presentable daughters. Alice was wayward and wilful. She pinched Norah at every opportunity and even wanted to take her name.

  As they grew, Pat became much closer to Norah. It was inevitable, she thought. They sat side by side at the Singer sewing machine, feeding lengths of cloth beneath its speedy needle. Their shoulders touched. Pat watched her elder daughter proclaim at family gatherings that she wanted to be an astronaut, while Norah, who resembled her father and was darkly beautiful, attracted others by the force of her personality alone. She was popular at school and elected School Captain. Pat saw in her the success she automatically esteemed. Yet even with Norah there was distance and unbreachable estrangement. Pat felt profoundly the solitary history of her body, her four lost babies, weighing somewhere inside her, like a persistent despondency. Her breasts sagged with the downward pull of her maternal history. She was old at thirty. She was sorrowful and embittered. Fred seemed unchanged by their marriage, and she was unable to tell him how very altered she was. Every marriage has these silences, these demolitions. The white noise of interior monologues that can never be spoken.

  When Alice gained admission to the university, Pat felt something for her daughter approximating admiration, but did not think to tell her. The University. It was where rich kids went. It was where young men and women learned subjects she could barely pronounce. She was not sure what it was that Alice was studying, but liked to be able to say, ‘my eldest, Alice, she’s now at the University’. When Alice visited on Sundays she saw that Pat liked her more now she had moved out of home. As she sat with Fred, watching football highlights he had videotaped from Saturday’s Match of the Day, Pat hovered, offering drinks and making polite conversation. Sometimes she smiled at her daughter as one would to a friendly stranger. It was a tentative peace between them, after all these years. Once she reached over and stroked her daughter’s hair. Alice looked up, surprised. Her touch was so unfamiliar.

  In the internet café, everyone but Alice seemed to be smoking. The air was miasmic, foul. She felt she was suffocating. The two rows of computer monitors, back to back, were ablaze in the carcinogenic dimness. At each sat someone under forty, typing intently or scrolling their mouse between ferocious puffs, for which the management had thoughtfully provided ashtrays in the shape of fish. When she looked along the row Alice saw Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, pornography, chat-sites and something that appeared to be an online casino: it flashed ‘Money! Money! Money!’ in a circle of rotating lights.

  This was an odd form of consumption, or play, or technological subservience, to be seated at the receptive nexus of so many intervening sites. There were galaxies of information in there, illimitable networks more complex than neural pathways, zapping multidirectionally. There were people to be met and goods to be bought. There were bodies to see and information to be known. Any book was there, to be sped towards you. Any crazy notion or marginal subgroup, any egoistic individual or antiquarian hobby. The mind of God. Cluttered, schismatic, astronomical, microscopic.

  Alice felt depressed. After this, she thought, she would visit a bookshop. Her tastes in knowledge garnering were irredeemably old-fashioned. She loved the feel of books, their integrity as objects. The wing-plan of them, the scent and warmth of paper. She loved the relat
ive stiffness of the cover and the sentience of settled print. Random flicking of pages, inscriptions, dog-ears. She loved – though it was a sin – to see books left open upside down, their bird shape accentuated in the keeping of a page. She loved those images of the Annunciation in which the Virgin rests her index finger on a page of her book, retaining her place during Gabriel’s visit. Or the mortuary statues in European churches, that have dukes and bishops sleeping in death on the pillow of an open book. She loved second-hand bookshops for their presumption that any tatty volume mattered, and new bookshops, for their signs and neat rows of books, waiting to be opened for the very first time. Inherited books. Books as gifts. Books as objects flung across the room in a lover’s argument. Books (this most of all) taken into the warm sexual space of the bed, held upon the lap, entered like another body, companionable, close, interconnecting with innermost things. Those bed books that chart the route between waking and sleeping, that are a venture of almost hypnagogic power. Those enticements. Adventures. Corridors of words. Capsules. Secrets.

  Alice’s e-mail announcement said she had fifty-one new messages. When she dragged the cursor over the list, only four were personal; another seven were from the university. The others sold sex aids, pharmaceuticals, land in the Bahamas, invited her to increase her dick size, to look at Mandy, to order a pet mongoose – delivered within two days – online with her credit card. From Stephen there was a long e-mail that began formally and with great restraint, but transmuted as it developed into a stream-of-consciousness rave, accusing her of severity and lack of feeling. E-mails generated stray emotion and haphazard expression. They had a viral susceptibility that altered tone. Cynical hip-dialect, data-stream waywardness. It distressed Alice to read Stephen’s note, and it was almost unanswerable. She would have to fashion a self-defence, find words that recovered the initial formality and refused the hysterical machinic transference. It was laborious, writing to Stephen, but he would be waiting for a reply, checking his in-box several times a day. E-mail functioned in this way, too, to give imperative demand, or command, where none should have existed.