Chapter Twenty-One #4
‘You said the novel made you angry,’ I say. ‘Was it because of the ending?’
She remains silent.
She’s not going to answer, I can tell.
Not yet anyway.
And there’s no doubt in my mind any more that she at least is one hundred per cent treating this as a therapy session.
I don’t mind though.
I’m not upset with her.
Just increasingly grateful, really, really grateful actually, that she – who was on the edge of her seat for me when I got my first BAFTA, and listened to me as a child, heard me back then – still cares enough about me that, at the age of ninety-three, she’s invited me into her home so that she can try again to help me.
Outside, the rain grows heavier, drumming against the windows.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she says, at length.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Everything.’
‘Can you give me something specific?’ she asks.
So, I do.
I give her my father’s theatre.
‘I miss him,’ said Clare, staring down at her pile of cards, holding Hans’s ring in her fist. ‘None of these are from him, I can’t feel him at all, and I miss him so much.’
‘Oh, Clare,’ said Iris. She was in bed, feeling nauseous, and failing to sleep. The workmen downstairs were making their usual stop-start racket, waking her every time she came close to drifting off. ‘He could still be here, missing you too.’
‘He’s not here.’ She pressed his ring to her chest. ‘But I do believe I’ll see him again.’ She tipped her head back against the eaves. ‘Perhaps I might not even have that long a wait.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Iris uneasily.
‘Do you remember when we talked about us all having been here before?’
‘Yes,’ said Iris, edgier yet. She still often thought of her non-fall down the stairs – every time, in fact, that she felt that returning presence within her, filling her with an urgency, to do what, she only wished she could guess – and didn’t at all like what she now realised Clare was saying.
‘It was a rumination, Clare. An idea … ’
‘It’s become more than that to me,’ said Clare. ‘I really don’t think any of this is final.’ She looked to the rain-drenched window. ‘I’m sure it’s just an act, in an endlessly repeating play.’
‘A long act, let’s hope,’ said Iris, sitting up now, hating the finality in her friend’s tone.
‘I suspect that’s already decided,’ Clare replied, in the same accepting way.
‘But the end doesn’t scare me, not if it takes us back to our beginning.
’ Her cheeks moved in a smile. ‘I want that. Even with all the pain, it helps, believing Hans and I will find one another again. Have our time again.’ Her voice scratched with emotion. ‘I need to believe that’s all waiting.’
‘Clare, you don’t know he’s gone … ’
‘He is.’
‘You can’t give up.’
‘I don’t want to … ’
‘Then don’t. Sleep instead. You’re exhausted.’
‘I can’t sleep,’ said Clare, turning again to the window, frowning at the rain outside.
‘Try at least.’
‘There’s no point,’ said Clare.
Then, ‘I think maybe I’ll go for a walk.’
‘I take it you know about my father,’ I say to Ellen.
‘I never met him, Claudia. Never spoke to him.’
‘But you know that he was … ’
‘In the car with you?’ She nods. ‘Yes, my dear. I do know about that.’
‘Mum said he couldn’t see the future … ’
‘None of us can do that.’
‘Maybe not,’ I say, although nothing would surprise me any more. ‘I do believe he couldn’t. Otherwise, he’d have stopped the crash from happening, wouldn’t he?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Mum said he believed that his other existences fed him instincts for the things he should do, the places he should be. I’m certain he must have been following one of those instincts when he got into the car with me, even if he didn’t know what it would cost him.
’ Those words are very hard to say. The idea of what he did for me, gave for me, gets no less painful for the amount of time I’ve now spent thinking about it.
‘I keep wondering whether he’d have done it if he had known.
Mum said he loved me more than life, but—’
‘You were his child,’ Ellen interrupts. ‘I absolutely believe he would have still chosen to protect you. As for what he knew, has it not occurred to you he might have sensed it was his time?’
‘No,’ I say, because I don’t want to think about anyone having a set time.
Not my father.
Not my grandparents.
Certainly not Robbie, and Iris, and the rest of them.
‘I do keep wondering about his instincts though,’ I say. ‘We all get them. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, in our lifetimes. Anticipation, excitement, dread, caution … ’
‘Hope,’ proffers Ellen. ‘Courage.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘All that. Most of us don’t question where they come from.
But my father did. He knew. When Mum described his theatre to me, I could see it.
’ I close my eyes, seeing it again. ‘So many infinite stages of time and existence, hovering over one another, each lit by its own house lanterns.’ I open my eyes, meeting Ellen’s focused stare. ‘Have you ever stood on a stage?’
‘I have not.’
‘You can’t see out. Not easily. Not when the lanterns are bright, and trained on you. They block everything beyond. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. You can hear it, if you listen. The coughs. The shuffles. A whisper.’
‘And you believe these whispers are where our instincts come from?’ Ellen says.
To my relief, there’s no scepticism in her tone.
No resistance.
Just desire to understand.
It gives me the courage to go on.
‘I do,’ I say. ‘I feel it now, everywhere, this sense of being amid layers of time. I’m sure that even if most of us aren’t consciously listening to those layers, we still always are.
And we react, like my father knew he was reacting, trying different paths, making changes, no layer exactly the same.
’ I draw breath, my mind moving to Tim, and all the different variations of his own past that he told Imogen.
I see my own dreams too, of Nick and me enacting those variations, and picture us still doing it, on other stages.
‘I believe that for some of us, our lanterns can flicker off. We get to see beyond our own layer, and steal glimpses, however fleeting, of the infinity we’re part of. ’
I look to Ellen, watching a crease form in her brow.
She’s thinking, I can tell.
Processing.
‘Do you have a theory for why this only happens for some of us?’ she asks.
‘My father thought it was a gift.’
‘Does it feel like that to you?’
‘It’s started to.’
‘Because you think you can help Iris.’ She phrases it as a statement rather than a question.
It doesn’t surprise me.
I realised she’d worked that much out from the moment she told me I couldn’t change the past.
‘You can’t,’ she repeats now. ‘Or certainly no more than this version of you might have already intervened. It’s all already happened, my dear. However infinite a theatre we might be a part of, however many acts we might yet have to play, in this present, in our present, the past is sealed … ’
‘But … ’
‘No, Claudia. Don’t forget, I was there, physically there. Whatever you hope you might yet do to reverse what’s gone, my memories aren’t going to rewrite themselves. You do not have that power.’
‘Then why does Iris keep pulling me back into her?’
‘I don’t believe it’s that way round.’
‘I do, though. She needs me … ’
‘It’s you who needs her.’
‘No.’ I all but shout it. ‘From the moment I arrived here, my lanterns started flickering off, I know now it happened when I was a child too, only it’s not my other stages I keep finding myself on.
It’s Iris’s. Even when I’m not in her, I hear her world.
That bird. Those planes. The hammering. I follow her instincts.
Then, when I slip into her, I see … everything.
It’s not false. It’s not imagined. It’s as though we’re the same person … ’
‘You are absolutely not the same person. You are you. Solely you.’
‘But … ’
‘No, listen to me now. You are you.’
‘Then why is this happening?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Ellen, and I can hear how much it perplexes her.
‘I did consider, when you were a child, that you might have an old soul. Incredulous as it makes me to say this, I’m wondering now if we all might carry some essence of those who are gone, with traces of other existences behind us, and in front of us, even if most of us don’t realise it.
’ She frowns, turning it over. ‘Maybe you and your father are right, too. Maybe we’re all ever-present, with our souls, and fragments of souls, living eternally in parallel, doing better, finding our way back to those we’ve loved, so we can love them again.
I hope so. It’s a wonderfully comforting idea.
But, Claudia –’ her unblinking eyes hold mine – ‘this is your existence. You belong on this stage.’ She shakes her head. ‘Nowhere else.’
I don’t try again to argue.
A sudden pelt of rain lashes the window, distracting me.
It’s really pouring now.
Absolutely sheeting.
Emma will be acting Clare’s last scene.
I want to stop it.
I want, so fiercely, to do that.
But whatever Iris was doing, in this crucial moment of her friend’s life, I’ve never had any sight of it.
Was there anything anyone could do? I asked Ellen.
Countless things, she said, but no one did them.
‘You can’t seriously want to go out in this,’ said Iris as Clare stood, pulling on her jacket.
The rain outside was getting heavier.
Absolutely sheeting.
‘I need some fresh air,’ said Clare. ‘And to get away from this wretched banging.’
‘You’ll get soaked.’
‘I’m not worried about that,’ said Clare, making for their bedroom door. ‘I’ll take Prim’s umbrella.’
‘Where were you when Clare died?’ I ask Ellen.
‘Barely fifty yards from her. I was coming out of the ops room. I’d stayed back to finish my reports, and I saw her. She saw me too, and started towards me.’ She speaks quietly, remembering. ‘She had my umbrella. I think she felt badly about it, and was coming to give it back.’
‘And Tim?’
‘Yes, he was there too. He struggled with sleep, and was on his way off for a walk. Clare had had the same idea. Then, out of nowhere, that Messerschmitt was swooping right down over the base.’ Her expression becomes distant.
‘He strafed Clare, and several groundcrew too, before our gunners shot him down.’
Silently, barely aware of my own movement, I shake my head.
‘They were all gone,’ says Ellen, and I see her heart clearly now: in her brimming stare, her clenched hands. ‘Extinguished, in a second.’ Her lips tremble in a heartbroken smile. ‘On this stage, anyway.’
I want to say something.
I can’t speak.
‘She wouldn’t have known anything about it,’ Ellen goes on.
‘I promise you that. I discovered, years later, that her fiancé had been killed only a few weeks before. It would be … wonderful, yes … to think that by the time I got to her, she was on her way back to him.’ She swallows.
‘I ran to her, the instant she fell. Tim did too. But she’d already left us.
’ Dipping her head, she presses her fingers to the corners of her eyes.
‘It broke Tim.’ Her shoulders move in a shallow breath. ‘He simply couldn’t stand it.’
‘The other day, he said the war is always happening.’ I force the words out, past the mass in my throat. ‘It upset him so much. I think all he could see of it was the pain. The fear … ’
‘Well, there was plenty of that.’ She drops her hands from her eyes. ‘Love too, though. So much love.’ She gives me another small smile. ‘Don’t forget that.’
‘What happened to Iris?’ I ask her again. ‘The book’s wrong about her, isn’t it? That’s why it made you angry.’
‘Of course it’s wrong. It’s fiction. A story. Tim should never have permitted it … ’
‘But what happened?’
‘You need to ask Tim.’
‘I’ve tried.’
‘Try again.’
‘Do you know what happened though?’ I say, and hear how entreating I sound.
But I need, so desperately, for her to tell me that she does.
To believe there’s a hope that I might yet find out.
Because I haven’t given up on being able to do something about this at least, no matter what Ellen might say about us all having our time. No matter her insistence that we can’t change this present’s past.
Rationally, logically, I accept that I probably should.
But there’s been nothing rational or logical about anything I’ve experienced here.
And I can’t give up on anything.
‘I don’t know what happened in that plane,’ Ellen says.
‘But I do know what didn’t happen on the ground.
I know what Iris didn’t do, and I’m certain of what she doesn’t deserve.
That at least can be fixed. So, visit Tim.
Talk to him like you’ve talked to me. Make him tell you.
’ She leans back in her chair. ‘Help him make amends at last.’