Invisible

‘What?’

‘Shakespeare.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It’s OK. Doesn’t matter.’

‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Edward. Don’t criticise my car and don’t be a smart-arse.’

‘OK. Fair enough. Onward,’ he declares, smacking the dashboard. He opens the window and puts his face into the rushing air.

‘Big kid,’ Charlotte mutters, patting his knee playfully, but she sees nothing playful in the expression that is fixed on her brother’s face: rather, there is anger in the furrows above his eyes, as if she has let him down by not giving him the answer he wanted. She gives him her news about the children, about Lucy’s prize for gymnastics and Sarah’s school trip to Wales. Simon might be in line for promotion, she tells him; her job at head office might be axed, though, and then she’d be back at the Gloucester branch. Edward smiles, nods his head, frowns concernedly, but he is thinking of something else. He seems to have decided that today will not be easy, but she can never tell any more what he’s thinking. It used to be like looking into a darkened cage, looking into his face. In his room, at his desk, he would put down the big lens and wince at her under the glaring light, straining to see. Now he has closed his eyes; he has the appearance of looking inward, making up his mind about something. ‘Try to be patient with Mum,’ she says, and he nods and puts his face back into the rushing air.

In the garden, sitting in the high-backed chair, he is as grim as a judge. Grasping the arms of the chair he tells her: ‘I might go. I might not go. There’s no point getting into a state when she hasn’t even got the job yet.’

‘But I worry, Edward.’

‘As do we all, Ma.’

‘How you’ll cope, I mean.’

‘It’s Italy, not the Siberian tundra. It’s really quite civilised. I’ll cope there the same way I cope here, if I go.’

‘I don’t know, Edward. I saw a story in the paper. Some American boy was kidnapped.’

‘Where, Mum? Where was this?’ Edward demands, almost shouting.

‘In the papers.’

‘Yes, I gathered that. But where in Italy?’

‘Somewhere, Edward. I don’t know. It was awful. Cut off his ear, they did.’

‘Believe me, I am not going to be kidnapped.’

‘Rome, I think it was. Or Naples.’

‘Naples,’ their father confirms.

‘Miles and miles and miles away, Mum. Another country. And I bet your American boy was the heir to a fortune. Not a random impecunious foreigner.’

‘I don’t know, Edward, but it was horrible.’

‘What a catch I’d be. One disabled translator. Any reasonable sum accepted. No cheques. Will consider part exchange. It’s not going to happen, is it? Be sensible, Mum.’

‘He’s right, Mary,’ says their father.

Their mother makes a gesture of woebegone appeal to her husband, miming his name. Looking wearily at Edward, she tallies the beads of her necklace. ‘But it’s a big step,’ she says, passing him another sandwich. ‘You have to think carefully.’

‘Believe it or not, Mum, that’s what I’m doing.’

‘It can so easily go wrong.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Edward moans, putting the sandwich down before he has taken a bite. ‘Here we go. This is the intro to Ethel, isn’t it? Ethel going bonkers in Winnipeg.’

‘You shouldn’t make fun, Edward. She had a shocking time, she did. Thought she’d be all right, but she needed her friends and her family more than she thought.’

‘Enough, please,’ Edward interrupts. ‘So Ethel went to Canada and became an abandoned wife with a brood of uncontrollable brats and a vicious addiction to sleeping tablets. From this you deduce not that an excitable young woman would be ill-advised, on the basis of a two-week romance, to follow a feckless womanising boozer to a godforsaken dump in the middle of a zillion acres of wheat, but that separation from the home soil brings inevitable ruin to any Brit. It doesn’t follow, Mum, so spare me the heart-rending tale of hapless Ethel and her Canadian purgatory. She is not germane to the case,’ he pronounces, using his words to push her away, and so she never says what she means to say, and what Edward knows she means to say, which is simply that she will miss him if he goes away, and is afraid that she might never see him again. ‘So, Mum, what’s been happening, then?’ he asks when he has finished the sandwich, but there isn’t much to say, because of course nothing much has been happening. They are nearing their seventies; they don’t go out very often; their friends have started to die. Edward knows this, but still he asks that stupid question, as if he were talking to a friend down the pub. If he could only see how he looks, she thinks. If he could only see their mother’s helpless face.

‘You all right there?’ his father asks him. Assured that Edward is content to bask in the sun and listen for a while, he excuses himself for a minute or two, to go to the bathroom. Ten minutes later, declining her help, Edward goes to find him.

Following the hum and whine, Edward climbs the stairs. He knocks and opens the door, as a chisel shrieks on spinning wood. ‘Is it safe?’ he shouts. ‘May I come in?’

The lathe winds down with a slumping sound. ‘Hello, son,’ says his father, as though Edward still lived at home and had casually wandered into the room. ‘Careful there,’ he says, as his toe comes into contact with the foot of the bench, but he stays where he is. ‘Clear on your right. Chair just beside you.’

‘So this is the shed?’ he asks, moving crabwise across the hardboard floor until he touches the chair. ‘That’s it.’

‘You’ve got the bench set up, then?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Must be really popular with the neighbours,’ he says, and his father makes a soft snorting sound that may signify a smile. ‘What are you making?’

‘A stool. A footstool. For your mother,’ says his father, putting a piece of wood into his hand. ‘That’s a leg for it.’ The leg has a cube at each end and is ringed with deep grooves which are warm and furred with fine shavings. ‘The ankles need a rest,’ his father explains, taking it back. ‘Not as nimble as she was.’ The lathe restarts; the dab of the cutting tool raises a cry and a whiff of hot wood.

Perceiving a difference between the sound on his left and on his right, he advances a hand across the wall. His hand encounters a low shelf, and another above it, and a third. ‘What’s here?’ he asks.

‘Hm?’ responds his father, though he heard the question.

‘Is this your pots and stuff?’

‘The cars,’ his father tells him.

Walking his fingers along a shelf, he locates one of the model cars. ‘I’ll be careful,’ he says, supporting the car on his flattened hand. He can feel the ridge of the exhaust pipe on his palm. ‘What’s this one?’ he asks.

‘Hm?’

‘What’s this one?’

‘A Bugatti. Show me? T55 Coupé.’

With his index finger he circles the spare wheel on the outside of the boot. He sweeps the wave-like running board, taps the conical headlamps, but he cannot remember anything of the Bugatti T55. His father’s models used to be kept in a mighty cabinet in the dining room, a cabinet of open decks, like a miniature multi-storey car park, painted white. He remembers a section reserved for illustrious older marques: a silver Auto Union car was there, with a scarlet Maserati and a green Vanwall. Concentrating on the name, he recovers the shape of the Vanwall, its thick blade of a body and the cockpit lodged behind the elongated bonnet, and, from this, momentarily, occurs an evanescent bloom of the Vanwall car’s deep green.

‘So, son,’ says his father, fitting another piece of wood to the lathe. ‘They keeping you busy?’ he asks, as if his translations were the benefaction of some charitable committee.

‘I’ve plenty of work, Dad, yes.’

‘Articles and stuff?’