The Water Tower - Books 4-5

Endings (II)

“And there was much weeping on the part of all;

“And there was much weeping on the part of all;“And there was much weeping on the part of all;they embraced Paul and kissed him,

they embraced Paul and kissed him,they embraced Paul and kissed him,being sorrowful most of all because

being sorrowful most of all becausebeing sorrowful most of all becauseof the word he had spoken,

of the word he had spoken,of the word he had spoken,that they would not see his face again.”

that they would not see his face again.”that they would not see his face again.”(Acts 20:37-38, English Standard Version)

* * *

It starts with a phone ringing. That’s always where it begins. Perhaps in the dead of night, or the quiet space of an undisturbed evening, or maybe during one of those long, still summer afternoons. Wherever you are, the first you know is when the phone rings.

Even then, you don’t really know. It’s just a sound at this stage. It could be anything. A wrong number, a telesales call, even a friend whose run away from someone they used to love.

reallyIn days gone by, it has been all of these things for him. The ringing phone that cuts through the air like a butter knife. He answers and he hears a voice that he knows.

“Aitch?” he says.

“Adam.” Her voice is delicate; wavering slightly. Her throat is hoarse.

Has she been… crying, he wonders?

Has she been… crying, “It’s Martin. He’s – Adam, Martin’s died.”

He has been here before. With her. Then, just like now, it had started with a phone ringing. He’d answered her call, heard her voice like a melody from younger days, and she’d spoken to him about endings. Endings made real. Impossible, unthinkable endings heralded by the ringing of a phone.

No, he thinks. No, this can’t be right.

NoNo, this can’t be rightIt is not an unusual reaction; his first thought is the same thought we all have in moments like this. There must be some mistake. He must have misunderstood. There must be another explanation.

This can’t be happening…

This can’t be happening…He remembers once hearing a friend answering the same call he answers now. “You are joking,” his friend had said when greeted with the news. He’d known his friend had wished instantly that he could have taken back the words; his face had flushed with the tell-tale signs of embarrassment as he stumbled in a bid to course correct.

jokingOf course they weren’t joking. Why would they be joking? Who would joke about a thing like that?

Of course they weren’t joking. Why would they be joking? Who would joke about a thing like that?His friend hadn’t meant it, of course; they were just words. Words to fill the emptiness. Words to show how much he’d wished it hadn’t been true.

He thinks of his friend, while the silence fills with the steady drum of his heartbeat. He tries to breathe. Tries to focus. Tries to collect his thoughts. Then he asks what any of us would ask in the same situation.

“What – what happened?”

“He – he had a heart attack,” she tells him. “Some time last night. That’s why – that’s why none of us could get hold of him. He was supposed to be meeting the Art Group this morning but, when he didn’t arrive, Harold and his wife went – they went round to the house and got no answer. In the end, one of the neighbours had to break in. He – oh, Adam, he never knew, did he? He never knew what happened to the Tower. He worked so hard to fight for it. He never lived to see the end.”

knewThat might, he thinks, have been a blessing.

That might,have been a blessing.He has slept late that morning, deflated and empty following the events of the evening before, most of which he spent wandering aimlessly before finally returning to the village via Salt Hill. It had gone one in the morning by the time he’d returned; the pub had been closed, and the streets had felt emptier than they ordinarily would have, even at that time of night. It had seemed to him as if everyone had retreated indoors, to the comforts of home and familiar surroundings, because the world outside had become too painful to face.

He listens to her for as long as she wants to talk; he knows that she and Constantine were friends. That, despite the distance that had developed between them, she never rented out the room in her heart where their friendship once lived.

She tells him that he was found in the reading room. He thinks of the room; associating time, place and memory with the deceased. The journey his mind takes is a mirror of the usual and practical; these are the same steps towards acceptance that we all travel. We think of times spent with the person who has gone; picture them in a place that we know, in a setting with which we are acquainted, at a time when our hearts were full and the world was perfect.

As he listens, he realises that this is where those people always come to rest, in the end; the ones who have gone. Not in their last moments, trapped between the beats of their last breath, but in the places we picture them. In their favourite rocking chair. In the sitting rooms of our childhoods. Beside the cooker in the kitchen stacking plates. In the garden beneath the pergola, tending to the climbing roses that have snaked up the trellis. Those pictures never fade. Those places never let their people go.

He will always think of Constantine in the reading room; in the place he knew him best. Where his bond with Madison was, at the old man’s behest, first forged. As Hilda talks, he pictures his cantankerous acquaintance there, among his books and his polished wooden fixtures, sitting on a tan brown couch beside the roaring fireplace that lit his solitary life.

“He – he had that photograph,” she tells him. “The one – you know, the one Sally…”

He remembers the photograph. The one that Sally had accidentally destroyed. The one that had meant so much to Constantine, for reasons not even Hilda understood.

“It was as if – as if he knew,” Hilda says to him. “He was just – sitting there, all his paperwork about the Tower spread out in front of him on the coffee table. And he was holding that picture. He’d bought a new frame for it. They found him… holding it to his chest.”

knewsitting thereNot to his chest, he realises. To his heart.

Not to his chestTo his heartBriefly, he recalls the last time he’d visited Dreyman’s House. He remembers the old man catching his breath, easing himself off the leather couch and clawing at a spasm of pain that had snagged his heart. His mind searches fruitlessly for the same clues we all search for when we are living these moments; signs we might have missed, indications that passed us by unknowingly. He wonders, like we all do, if there was something he could have done.

“Have you been?” he asks her. “To the house?”

“Yes,” she tells him. “He had a cousin. Well, a distant cousin. She lives somewhere in Doncaster, I think. She’s coming to – to take care of things.”

distantHe understands.

“Have you told Madison?” he says next. It seems the right thing to ask. It is the next step in the journey; finding out who else knows, who else she has spoken to and who, in turn, he might contact himself.

“I rang her before I called you. I – I hope you don’t mind, I wanted her to hear it from me.”

“Of course not, that’s fine. She’s known him longer.”

“Oh Adam, she’s devastated. She just started crying and – and, God bless her, she wouldn’t stop. I think, after everything that went on last night, she’s struggling to take much more. I wondered if you’d—?”

“Yeah, of course. I’ll speak to her.”

He knows that news of the old man’s death will spread quickly. It is only to be expected. A sea of conversation will carry it through the streets and the gardens and the compact little lives of his neighbours and friends. Only then will it become real. It will cease to be a secret known only to a select few. It will be widespread. Tangible.

They will talk about him, all the people who knew the old man. In the café and the pub. At the Bowling Green and around the shops. His likes and dislikes. His faults and foibles. His quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Still trying to process what he has been told, he thinks about the call he will have to make to Madison. He knows how wounding it will be for her, the hammer-blow of Constantine’s death arriving with such suddenness, so unexpectedly. He knows he will call Clarissa too; someone will have to tell her and he should be the one.

Outside, in the street, he sees three people clustered together on the corner, talking. He wonders which demise will resonate more? Which ending – both so abrupt and unanticipated – will break more hearts? The Tower or the man?

“I knew something was wrong,” he hears her saying, as his attention is pulled back to their conversation. “I don’t know why – or even how – I just felt it. When he didn’t answer.”

howSometimes, he thinks, you just know.

Sometimesyou just know.There are bonds which exist between certain people that transcend what can be rationally explained. They are sensitive; instinctual. She was close to Constantine. In much the same way as he’d thought himself close to—

Could she have known, subconsciously, he wonders? Could some tether that bound them to one other have suddenly come loose? Could the sensation of that tether, falling away into the waters of forever never to resurface, really have echoed through her mind? Could you be so close to someone that you’d feel it, when they left? So close that you’d sense their absence? So close that you’d know? So close that, somewhere deep inside, your heart and mind would register that they were gone?

Couldreallysofeel sense knowThese are questions he cannot answer. No one could. So he puts them aside and he listens. Her voice, after all this time, still travels in waves of reassurance – even now, in darker moments like this, she is there. And he loves her for it.

“I suppose, in the end, he just… slipped away,” she tells him. “He must have closed his eyes and that was that. They think it was probably very sudden. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t have felt very much at all.”

These are, he knows, the small comforts we all seek.

“Oh, he was looking forward to his ordination so much,” she goes on to say. “He had his heart set on it. Turns out his heart had other plans.”

so muchEndings always bring with them the taste of stories never told. Of roads not travelled. Of chances never grasped, and days that will be missed. In the wake of every ending, there will always be things that could have been; wants and wishes that will never come to pass.

could“I suppose,” she finishes, “it was strangely beautiful in its own way.”

“What was?”

“Well, that he should go out, holding that photograph. It has a sort of – oh, I don’t know – a nice symmetry to it, doesn’t it? I wonder if he wanted it to be like that? Just him, on his own, holding that picture of his brother as he faded away.”

wantedEndings bring questions. Unanswerable questions. Did they know? Did they feel it coming? Did something intangible, lingering on the cusp of their mind, suggest to them that perhaps – just perhaps – their final curtain was drawing near?

perhapsHe thinks again of the old man catching his breath and wonders if he knew.

Was that why he had the photograph? Was that why he took it from the drawer or the dresser or the quiet little corner where he’d tucked it away? So he could fade away with Samuel pressed against his heart?

Was that why he had the photograph? Was that why he took it from the drawer or the dresser or the quiet little corner where he’d tucked it away? So he could fade away with Samuel pressed against his heart?“I suppose,” he answers, “it’s the kindest way to go.”

kindestHe knows all too well that there are crueller ways. The last step on his journey is, inevitably, to seek solace in that fact. In the past, when his phone has rung and he has heard a voice just like this one, heralding endings that came steeped in brutal abruptness and sharp finality, he has found such consolations to be few and far between. So he takes them where he can.

The old man has not suffered. He has been spared having to face the new, uncertain world that they have all awoken to, the morning after their last, long night.

He has been spared the grief, of course; the grief that those left behind will have to live through.

He has burned brightly, then faded softly; disappearing like a dream in the blink of someone’s eye.

He will be remembered well. Spoken of with smiles and fond remembrances. He was a personality, they will say. A character.

personalitycharacterBut perhaps most importantly of all, he has died with the memory of the person he loved most wrapped around his soul. Whether they believe that man to be his brother, or whether they are one of the few who know otherwise, what Hilda has called “beautiful” will still be exactly that.

* * *

Adam stared at his phone, his restless mind overcome with indecisiveness. The day was drawing in around Orchard House. Outside, he knew, rumours would be spreading; breathless speculation would abound.

And there would be emptiness. A pervading sense that so much promise had been left unfulfilled by Constantine’s death. He assumed Victoria would have heard by now. That if someone hadn’t told her—

Who, he asked himself? Who would have rung her?

Who, Who would have rung her?—she would have heard the news somehow during the course of the day.

Has she been out of the house? Has she seen anyone? Spoken to anyone since—?

Has she been out of the house? Has she seen anyone? Spoken to anyone since—?Since what happened.

Since what happened.He picked up the phone, scrolled to find her number, raising his finger in readiness over the “Call” button. Then he placed it down on the coffee table and sank back, watching the twilight blanket Merevale Road.

Eventually, he pressed the Send button on his open email.

SendSendHis eyes still fixed on the deepening starlight, Adam thought about Hilda. He thought about her long into the night, imagined her sitting alone in her house on Rosary Road, the only sound to accompany her drift into slumber that of the pendulum clock on the mantelpiece, ticking away the hours until sunrise.