The Changing of Keys, page 23
His kiss goodnight felt as much like a lie as his kiss onstage had turned out to be. He was so exacting about how people should treat him—so touchy, so mocking, so vicious when crossed or affronted, and yet he felt supremely entitled to be unfair himself. He had punished me for something that wasn’t my idea, and worse: for something that should have pleased him, that should have pleased any reasonable, normal father. But he was seldom reasonable. And while I’d always feared him when he wasn’t, now I was learning not to trust him when he was.
And so, the next day, we took a boat ride. I wouldn’t say much to him that morning and maybe it was the only thing he could think of to do with me. We sat at a little table under an arched roof made of glass and gazed out at the light-gray sky and the dark-gray water, sipping lemonade and listening to the guide. I avoided Daddy’s eyes. I didn’t want him to see the disillusionment in mine.
XXV
Uneasiness hovered over us. After a day or so in which we silently toured the villages and countryside of the Midlands, I realized that one of us was going to have to unbend and reestablish something like a normal speaking relationship. And judging by what had happened to my parents’ marriage, I figured it was going to have to be me. So I became polite, as if he were the father of some friend I happened to be traveling with—made conversation of a sort about whatever we were looking at, asked his permission for things as only a guest would. We were civil. It wasn’t fun, but it was an improvement.
In this fragile state of truce, we wandered through Coventry and Warwick Castle and Stratford-upon-Avon. Finally—Daddy having ruled out Scotland for lack of time—we went to Wales.
Something strange happened in Wales. I still can’t explain it.
We had come down the M50 to Gloucestershire and crossed into Gwent at Monmouth around lunchtime. I’d started keeping a little travel journal after Birmingham, mostly because I was entranced with all the storybook-sounding place names and wanted to keep a record of them, but also because writing gave me an excuse not to talk. When we got off the highway and stopped at a sort of bistro to eat, I busied myself listing the latest odd locations in my notebook and looking at the map to see what was coming next.
One intrigued me enough to break the silence.
“What’s Tintern?” I asked Daddy, who had put down his menu and was glancing around the room with a scowl, obviously annoyed that no one was coming to take our order.
“Little town with an abbey nearby. A ruined abbey.”
“What’s an abbey?”
“A building where members of a religious order live and work, like a monastery for monks or a convent for nuns, with rooms to sleep in, and a kitchen and a church and probably vegetable gardens and such. For people who want to be loomed over by God twenty-four hours a day.” He grimaced. “Actually, Tintern Abbey is quite old and famous. A poet named Wordsworth visited it and wrote a poem that most people have to study in school, sooner or later. I suppose we ought to go see it—you can impress your teacher with a first-hand account, when the time comes.”
“Okay.” I didn’t mind. Tintern sounded like lantern and I saw in my head a great, castle-like place aglow with magical light. But I was surprised that Daddy would volunteer to go anywhere religious after Coventry: When we’d parked outside the cathedral there, he had taken one look at the grim brick-and-concrete hulk they’d put up to replace the original that had been destroyed by bombs in the war, and refused to go in. Said God was enough of a monstrosity himself without people constructing hideous piles in his honor. He’d stayed in the car, moodily, while I explored by myself for a few minutes. It was undeniably ugly—almost brutish, inside and out, with none of the grace the old part had, even in its wrecked state. But except that the bombs falling on it was sad, I wasn’t bothered by it. A church was just a building to me.
When I got back in the car, Daddy started to pull out of the space, but then jammed the brakes on and turned to me, as if he couldn’t help himself.
“So what did you think?”
I was surprised. “I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “The old part was a lot nicer than the new part, though there isn’t much left of it.”
He put the car in park again. “Didn’t give you the creeps?”
I shrugged. “Not really. I don’t get church. Maddie has to go every Sunday and she always acts like it’s a big pain, and her parents always make her have fish when they take us out on Fridays and she always has a fit because she wants a hamburger. Why can’t she just have a hamburger? Church just seems like a lot of weird rules you have to worry about not breaking so you won’t go to hell. And Maddie doesn’t even believe in hell, so what’s the point?”
“That’s a very good question.”
“Do you believe in God?”
A look I’d never seen before took over his face, a bitter, closed-up kind of look that wasn’t so much angry as unnerved, as if he wanted to say no, but was afraid to. He shook his head slightly and put the car in reverse again.
“God is nothing but a bad idea that people with power over others use to get what they want. Don’t let them use it on you,” he said curtly, and stepped hard on the accelerator.
So going to Tintern made no sense to me, from his point of view, but I wasn’t about to pry at him. I just looked out the window as we drove through the lush countryside, taking in the hedgerowed fields and the rare, brilliant yellow slopes of feathery rapeseed that yielded to stands of tall trees. The sun had fully come out for the first time in days, which cheered me up a lot and turned the road we were on—hardly more than a shady lane—into a river of shifting pools, hazy with bubbles of light here, sharply black there, all overarched by a gorgeous, green-gold canopy. Even Daddy seemed happier; I’d always half-consciously wondered why sun in the house bothered him so much, but sun outdoors didn’t—as if home were a place to be afraid, but being in public made him brave.
We parked near the abbey and stood looking at it a long time before going into the visitor’s center to get guide-maps. It gave me a different sensation than Coventry. No rebuilding had interfered with the tumbled walls and gray, eroded stones and it seemed more at peace with itself and its tragedy, as if its skeletal remains, broken though they were, were quite beautiful enough.
We didn’t walk around together: Daddy got a headset for the audio tour, but I didn’t want one, so we made our own ways through the ruins and grounds. We ended up together in a grassy area that made a sort of courtyard; he took off his earphones with a tentative smile.
“Rather striking, isn’t it?”
“I like it. It looks almost more like a sculpture than a building.”
“So it does.”
“But”—I winced inside at asking what I couldn’t suppress—“I thought you hated churches.”
He looked at me thoughtfully, without irritation. “I don’t like churches, though some are worth seeing for architectural or historical reasons. And they’re often marvelous to sing in, particularly the ancient ones. But I think I like this place because it doesn’t feel like a church at all, just a very interesting relic of a lost civilization. There’s very little of humans and their twisted beliefs left here, and a great deal of nature. I’d say it’s a better balance.”
I wanted to ask more about the twisted beliefs, but thought better of it.
We took snapshots of each other in front of a great, empty window whose stone tracery was thought to have held stained-glass pictures in rich reds and blues, but that now framed only grass and trees in natural greens. Mine shows me, a stick child in loose shorts, as overpowered by the huge, vacant archway as a buttercup by an oak tree, tightly clutching the strap of my purse with both hands, one arm folded vertically and the other pressed hard across my pink T-shirted stomach, as if the bag were a balloon likely to carry me off. The wind has blown my short hair over one eye, but the uncovered one stares directly at the camera, its frankness belied by the misgiving in the smile. My father’s image records his practiced performer’s pose—three-quarter view, arms at sides—whose rigid lines form a cage that his oblique glance escapes, refusing to be met or known, or to reveal anything.
Like hurt or guilt. Like the truth. Like tenderness.
Unconfessed.
We stayed the night at a nearby bed-and-breakfast that luckily had a vacancy; Daddy had made a reservation for us in Cardiff the day before, but Tintern had slowed us down and neither of us wanted to drive farther that night. Not that we were all that enthusiastic about the B&B—for two people used to gleaming, modern hotels and sophisticated service, the lace-curtain-and-quilt homeliness of the place felt…well, not shabby, exactly, but unprofessional. I knew Daddy was dreading having to make conversation with the family, but they must have sensed this because, after the necessary chitchat about the room and our bags and what there was to do and the full English breakfast, they left us alone.
We left early the next morning, while the mist was still sitting like topping on the oxbow of river across the road. Daddy wanted to follow the coastline southwest along the Bristol Channel for a way, then cross the river Usk (another excellent name, mastodonish, like musk and tusk) and swing up to Caerphilly before ending in Cardiff that night. Caerphilly. I’d written it in my notebook the moment I’d discovered it on the map. It sounded like horses, like “kerfuffle,” like “filigree”—another impossibly whimsical British name, a place where gnomes and fairies should gather for tea parties. Daddy had seemed reluctant to consider going there, at first—asked me if I wouldn’t rather tour Chepstow Castle and its town, as they were right there by Tintern, but the word Chepstow had no melody to it. I wanted Caerphilly, and so, as he had about most things since that night in Birmingham, he let me have my way.
It was a day of pale, watery sunlight that erased the line between sea and sky. We followed local roads as close to the rocky, muddy shore as we could, stopping once in a while to walk out on a seawall or a bit of beach and look at the shallow water of the channel. I got bored, then hungry; we crossed the M4 and stopped for a snack. By the time we parked on the drive leading to the castle, the sky was overcast and I was full, sleepy and whiny about having to walk around anymore. The look on my father’s face reminded me why I had been so carefully polite to him for a week. I forced myself out of the car.
And then I saw the castle.
It rose from its lake like the black core of a volcano rising from a crater: stark and grim, unlovely, and yet possessed of some fierce solitude, some brooding, primeval power that gave it beauty.
I had never seen anything like it.
Wide-eyed, I grabbed Daddy’s hand and dragged him up the walk—a stuttering progress, as I became immobilized every ten seconds by some new view of the bare towers against the sky or reflected in the moat or pushing up from steep patches of emerald grass within the walls. It was nothing but stones—stones arranged for defense and shelter, now worn and streaked or overgrown—and even so, what they made became a sort of being, with mood and presence, with effect, the way notes become, not just music, but a living experience of music. I didn’t use such words, then—I just knew that the harsh purity of the place spoke to me as if we shared something I hadn’t known was mine, spoke in a soundless tongue that described the dark, shapeless things I felt, that pulled me. And I understood it because the castle was those things.
There was little in it, just a few heraldic shields hanging in the Great Hall and a few plain tables and chairs. Someone had had the good sense not to spoil it with exhibits and animatronic mannequins. It was only itself: the bones of the earth, reordered by ancient human intelligence for a clear and simple purpose. And in the reordering, they had, through a kind of alchemy, taken on their manipulators’ essence, a nobility not of privilege, but of brilliance and severity, of secrecy, resilience, and blunt expectation, so that the walls into which they were made captured the dark and light of mankind’s hooded complexity and naked, relentless will.
I climbed every slope and parapet, peered into every corner. I liked it empty. It didn’t occur to me to imagine it peopled with knights and ladies: Weighty as it was, it belonged to the air, to wraiths and mists and echoes—to feelings, not to rational thought, and certainly not to work. A place only of sensations and the subconscious.
I realized after a while that Daddy wasn’t nearby and went searching for him. I finally noticed him sitting on the grass with his back against the wall of the big round tower. He had folded his arms across his raised knees and put his head down on them as if he were sleeping. But at my tentative tap on his shoulder, he looked up immediately. His eyes were red.
“Have you seen enough?” he asked.
I slowly shook my head. “Could we stay here? Is there a hotel?”
He rubbed his eyes. “No, we really can’t. We have that reservation in Cardiff and we’ve already had to pay for one night we didn’t even stay there. I suppose we could get lunch here, but then we must be off.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“I didn’t say that,” he replied, sharply. “It’s just not as new to me as it is to you. I’ve been here before.”
“You didn’t tell me that. When?”
He studied me. “Before you were born,” he said, unwillingly. “Your mother and I came here before you were born.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“It hardly seemed likely to be of any interest to you, nor was it properly any of your concern.”
“But it’s about us, our family!”
“We haven’t been a family for a long time.”
He pressed his lips together and stared at the crushed grass under his feet.
“I’m your family, and I’m Mom’s family too!”
I waited. He had never told me much about his life, not about meeting Mom, not about growing up. That’s how I knew when something mattered: It was never discussed.
He took a crumpled tissue from his pocket and briskly scrubbed at his nose with it. At last, “Caerphilly is where I asked your mother to marry me,” he said. “We were going to come back here together one day. But we didn’t, and now we won’t. Diwedd y gân yw’r geiniog.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just something my father used to say as a joke. ‘At the end of the song comes the payment.’” He shrugged. “I never actually wanted to see Caerphilly again.”
He put his sunglasses on and leaned back against the wall again. “You go on and look around a while longer, if you like. I’m going to stay here.”
I stood there a moment or two longer, but he didn’t say anything else. I wandered down to the curtain wall and gazed over it at the lake and the crowds of people walking around it without really seeing them. This is where their marriage had truly started, where I had started, in a way. Our family had been born here—a family that died in infancy a few years later and thousands of miles away. I imagined I saw them together, on the sidewalk or on top of a tower, laughing together as I was sure they had, but couldn’t remember when. Ghosts of a dead love. Unresurrectably dead.
I hadn’t realized that I’d held a hope that they would get back together one day. Until that second, I’d have said I was glad to keep them apart, to keep the peace, that I hated the fighting and the sarcasm and the constant fear of trouble. It would have been true. He was a terror and she provoked him. They were a disaster together. And yet I knew right then that something was abruptly gone that had always been there, and it would never come back. We would never be a real family again, the three of us—forever only two at a time, with a recurring blank space in the rhythm of our lives, like a skipped heartbeat.
And that’s when the strange thing happened. The desolation of the vanished hope that left me empty somehow collided with the desolation of this somber fortress that filled me up, and an odd intoxication seized me as I looked at the dark towers and the green hills, a kind of recklessness I had never experienced before and never would again—a wild euphoria of grief, like the flaring of a star before it collapses into dense, black nothing.
Weirdly, I seemed to rise and expand, as if I were drifting an inch or two above the ground. I circumnavigated the castle, ecstatically running up every slope and stairway as if I would fly off the top of it, in soaring love with this black mass of stones, and in despair. I sailed back to my father on these wings of wax and pulled him along with me toward the town, chattering and dancing around him, every sense elevated, every perception as vivid as if it had been outlined. The small patches of flowers, the chimneyed rooftops, his mystified smile, each quaint or drab shop window—every sight was beautiful and the beauty was sharpened by the buried ache at the core of me.
I floated up a hill on a narrow, winding street, blithe to my father’s resisting steps, and found at the top, as if I had known it was there, a low, rambling lodge, white with green shutters, and a broad green garden in back with a few picnic tables scattered over it. The front door opened on a fantasy of rose-printed sofas and lamplight, of black-lacquered captain’s chairs full of bristly old men who grinned sweetly and winked from under their cloth caps like the golden lights in the bottles on the mirrored wall behind them. Every silver hair of their chins glimmered, every banknote crackled like butcher paper as it moved from pocket to bar, and we filled our hands with baskets of hot, richly oily fish and chips and cold bottles of lemonade, before gliding outdoors to spread it like a feast on the farthest table at the highest point on the rim of the hill, overlooking the castle below. Music popped in electronic spangles from the inn loudspeaker, and we sang and crunched our steaming fish and joked and uproariously swilled down our biting, bittersweet drinks, and it was a party—a party, and I abandoned myself to it, looking on through the faraway clear lens of my odd rapture at a wake attended only by me and my father, and I keened inside over the corpse of our family and the loss of the love that had made us one.
