The Possession of Mr Cave. Matt Haig
Only this time it was stronger. It was as though someone was turning a dial in my mind, sliding it across frequencies, trying to find a different station. The feeling was at its most intense as I patted the saddle and let the Scottish lady wheel the bicycle away from me. I stood there for a while, in this kind of vague trance, watching her roll it down the street. I stayed there until the bicycle disappeared, and the sensation stopped, leaving my mind restored to its comforting mode of sadness.
As your former hero Pablo Casals once put it, to be a musician is to recognise the soul that lives in objects. A soul that may be made most visible by a Steinway or a Stradivari, or may be most well expressed by a Bach or a Mozart, but that is always there, in every thing of substance.
Of course, I am not a musician. I sell antiques, but the same knowledge applies. You sit all day in a shop, with the old clocks and the tables and the chairs, the plates and the bureaus, and you feel just like them. Just another object that has lived through events it could not change, crafted and transformed, forced to sit and wait in a kind of limbo, its fate as unknown as all the others’.
A customer came in one afternoon – a bullish man of the Yorkshire mould. The sort of chap within whom arrogance and ignorance compete for top billing. He grumbled his way around from price tag to price tag, telling Cynthia and myself that he’d be very surprised if we’d get this much for an art nouveau figurine, or that much for a reading table.
‘Oh,’ said Cynthia. ‘But it’s rosewood.’
‘Makes no difference,’ the man said.
‘And it’s early Georgian.’
‘Early Mesopotamian wouldn’t justify that price.’
By that point, I’d had enough.
‘There are two types of customer for antiques,’ I told him. ‘There are those who appreciate an object’s soul, and understand that, truly, even the smallest items – the sauce ladles, the thimbles, the silver barrel nutmeg graters – can only ever be undervalued. These I would call the true aficionados, the people who appreciate all the lives that have grated with, or worn, or poured, or sat at, or cried near, or dreamed upon, or cried against, or fallen in love in the same room as such things. These are the people who like to frequent an establishment such as Cave Antiques.’
He stood there, mirroring Cynthia’s widening mouth and eyes, as unlikely to interrupt as the figure in his hand. The Girl with a Tambourine, decorated in green and pink enamels. I had bought it originally as part of a pair. The other one had dropped and smashed when I had collided with the chest on my way to reach Reuben, the night he died.
I continued: ‘Whereas the other type, the type I might just see before me now, is the customer who sees an object as the sum of the materials with which it has been made. The customer who does not understand or acknowledge the hands that went into its making, or the centuries-long affection which various and long-dead owners have bestowed upon said item. No, these people are ignorant of such matters. They don’t care for them. They see numbers where they should see beauty. They look at the face of a brass dial clock and see only the time.’
The man stood there, almost as bemused as myself by this outburst. ‘I was going to buy this for my wife’s birthday,’ he said, placing the art nouveau figure back where it came from. ‘But with service like this I think I’ll take my custom elsewhere.’
After he left I had Cynthia to deal with. ‘Terence, what on earth has got into you?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t like the way he was talking to you.’
‘Good God, Terence. I’m old and ugly enough to look after myself. We just lost a sale there.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. It wasn’t about him. I’m sorry.’
She sighed. ‘You know what you need, don’t you?’
I shook my head.
‘You need to get away. You and Bryony. A holiday. I could look after the shop for a week.’
A holiday. Even the word seemed preposterous. A dancing jester at a wake, handing out picture postcards. It prompted a fleeting blink of a memory. Heading south on a French motorway with you and Reuben asleep in the back, your bodies curved towards each other like closed brackets.
‘No, Cynthia, I don’t think so,’ I said, but all afternoon the idea grew and grew.
Maybe it wasn’t so preposterous after all. Maybe this was our opportunity to restore things. To pick up all the broken pieces and put things back the way they once were. Yes, this was the chance to heal our fractured souls.
Ever since the funeral I had been aware of slight changes to your behaviour.
Instead of the sombre strains of Pablo Casals, or your own cello, I would hear a different kind of music coming from your room. A violent and ugly kind of noise that I would ask you to turn down almost every evening.
You rarely practised your cello, now. You still went to your lesson at the music college every week, but when I asked how it went I’d get shrugs or small hums in return. A friend I had never heard about – Imogen – suddenly became someone you had to call every evening. Your bedroom door would always be closed and I would sometimes stand there behind it, trying to work out if you were on your bed or at your computer. I noticed, once, when you stepped out, that you’d taken your poster of Pablo Casals down from the wall. The old cello maestro who had always been such an inspiration.
It seemed incredible. I thought that man was your idol.
You had adored his interpretation of Bach’s cello suites. You had even ordered that old footage from the library. Pablo, aged ninety-four, conducting a special concert at the United Nations. The tiny old man, his time-creased face reflecting perfectly the strain and emotion of the orchestral movements until there seemed to be no difference between them, the man and the music, so that each refrain heard in that grand hall seemed to be a direct leaking of his soul.
You had devoured his memoirs, and told me to read them too. The story I remember now was when he and a few companions walked up Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco. Pablo was in his eighties, and had felt very weak and tired that morning, but to the bemusement of his friends had insisted that he still wanted to climb the mountain. They agreed to go with him but then, during the descent, disaster struck. Do you remember that story?
A large boulder had become dislodged further up the mountainside and was now hurtling towards them. The boulder missed all of his companions but, having seen it, Pablo froze. As it shot past, the giant rock managed to hit and smash Pablo’s left hand, his fingering hand. His friends looked with horror at the mangled, blood-soaked fingers, but Pablo showed no sign of pain or fear. In fact, he was overwhelmed with a kind of relief, and thanked God he would never have to play the cello again.
‘A gift can also be a curse,’ wrote the man who had felt enslaved by his art since he was a child. The man who had anxiety attacks before every single performance.
This last fact that had always comforted you when playing in public. And so it made no sense, with the annual York Drama and Music Festival not too far away, that you would want to take down his poster. A trivial issue, I suppose, but one I viewed as symptomatic of a broader change.
Maybe I should have been firmer with you then.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have let you shut yourself away. At the time, though, I imagined this was your way of grieving. In tribute to the life of your brother you were shrouding yourself in the same mystery.
What I didn’t realise was that this retreat would continue, that you would slip further and further away from me until the point at which I couldn’t call you back.
As I flicked through the travel section of the newspaper I saw it – a weak black-and-white photograph of the Colosseum. ‘Price includes flights and six-night stay in the Hotel Raphael.’
The city of faith and antiquity and perspective, the place people go to mourn and accept the transient nature of human life, where old temples and frescoes