Double Vision

  ‘You mean, he can’t tell where he stops and other people start?’

  ‘He’s not dangerous.’

  ‘Alec, that is dangerous.’

  ‘I can see it must’ve been a terrible shock.’

  She felt like giving him a few shocks of her own. ‘Why didn’t you tell me he’d been to prison?’

  ‘It didn’t seem relevant. He hasn’t been in trouble with the law for more than five years.’

  ‘I was the person to decide if it was relevant. It’s quite simple, Alec. If you want him in your house getting off with your daughter, that’s your business. But I have the right to decide who I want to trust. You should’ve warned me.’

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, after a long dragging pause.

  ‘It’s difficult.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘What did he do to get sent to prison?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  ‘It wasn’t a sexual offence. I always specified I couldn’t take sex offenders because of Justine.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘What, then? Murder?’

  She expected, hoped, that he’d laugh and accuse her of being melodramatic. Instead, he sighed. ‘I really can’t talk about this.’

  And that was that. She could tell he wouldn’t budge.

  ‘I was alone with him, hour after hour, day after day, and you can’t say, “Well, so what? Nothing happened,” because last night something did happen.’

  ‘Did he threaten you?’

  She was silent. ‘Alec, do you know what it is to be really frightened?’ She wasn’t explaining this well, because she didn’t understand it herself.

  ‘Are you going to tell the police?’

  She stared at him. His glasses flashed in a glint of light that struggled through the leaves. ‘Why? Why is it so important for me not to tell them?’

  ‘It could be very serious for him.’ He started to speak, stopped and started again. ‘He hasn’t really done anything, has he?’

  ‘You mean he’s on parole?’

  Alec looked down at his hands.

  ‘No, I won’t tell them.’ She looked at the carrier bag at her feet. ‘I’ve brought all his stuff. I haven’t got his address – I always paid in cash. And this’ – she held up the envelope on top – ‘is payment to the end of the month.’

  ‘What’s he done, Kate? Except get a bit obsessed?’

  ‘Mucked up the contents of my head. But I quite agree that’s not a crime. You see, I’m not being spiteful. I’m trying to understand, but I don’t understand, and I don’t think you do either. And it does seem to me that while you were dishing out the Christian charity, you might have spared a bit of it for me.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s in love with you, Kate. Have you thought of that?’

  She shook her head vigorously, involving her shoulders, back and arms, like somebody trying to shake off an unpleasant insect. ‘No, I don’t think that’s it, at all.’

  She was almost in tears. Alec reached out his hand, but she moved out of range. ‘Don’t bother getting up, Alec. I can see myself out.’

  Nineteen

  Stephen listened in silence to Kate’s account of her meeting with Alec. When she’d finished, he said, ‘You won’t weaken and take him back, will you?’

  ‘Good God, no.’

  She looked so tired and lonely he wanted to hug her, but they weren’t on hugging terms, so he touched her gently on the arm and wished her luck.

  When he told Justine about Peter’s midnight visit to the studio, she shrugged her shoulders and went back to chopping peppers.

  ‘Was that your impression? That he’s got problems dealing with boundaries between people?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘It’s not the way he sees it. He thinks he’s got exceptional powers of empathy. And he hasn’t, of course. What he does is dump his own emotions on to the other person and then he empathizes with himself.’ She shrugged again, this time violently. ‘It’s a mess.’ She scooped up the chopped peppers and threw them into the pan.

  He thought the conversation was over, but a second later she surprised him by laughing. ‘You know what his ambition is, apart from being a writer? To be a therapist. He thinks he’d be better at it than most of the ones he’s known.’

  ‘How many has he known?’

  ‘Oh, a few.’

  ‘He’s addicted to therapy?’

  ‘He’s addicted to giving therapists hell.’

  ‘Justine,’ he said, coming up behind her and putting his arms around her. ‘Do you know what he did?’

  ‘No. What does it matter anyway?’

  ‘You don’t think Kate had the right to know what she was dealing with?’

  She turned to face him. ‘I don’t see the point of hounding people.’

  ‘No,’ he said, taking the plates from under the grill. ‘Neither do I. But I’ve got to do something about those stories. I’ve either got to send them back, or… I don’t know. Respond, anyway.’

  Justine had promised Beth she’d take Adam to the fair, and persuaded Stephen to go with them. He’d agreed with reluctance, but found himself looking forward to it by the end of the week. He’d been working so hard cooped up in the cottage that he was starting to go stir-crazy.

  They could hear the music while they were still half a mile away. Behind Stephen, as he braked and turned, the Sainsbury’s carrier bags, with their sober reminders of the routines of adult life, rocked and swayed, and one of them spilt its contents on to the floor.

  ‘Just leave it, Adam,’ Justine said, turning round. ‘We’ll sort it out when we get back.’

  The moor was not far from the centre of town, but so big that on dark nights you could feel lost crossing it. Music thumped from loudspeakers stationed at every corner of the fairground. They seemed to wade through noise, lean into it. Young girls, faces blank in the yellow, green and purple lights, shouted and screamed, while gangs of youths stared after them, their bristly scalps slick with sweat. In the male guffawing, which both acknowledged and discounted the girls’ presence, there was a yelp of pain. The clammy night, the syrupy music oozing like sweat from every pore, the smell of beer on belched breath as another group of youths walked past, combined to produce a sexual tension that hung over everything as palpable as heat.

  Stephen was beginning to enjoy himself. Even the muddy ground, the sparse, trampled grass, purple under the revolving lights, tugged up memories from way back.

  ‘We’ve got to go on something,’ Justine shouted.

  ‘Yes,’ he shouted back, looking around for some innocuous ride, one that didn’t involve being pinned to the walls of a spinning globe by centrifugal force while your cheeks were dragged back to your ears. He pointed at the Ferris wheel, not because it looked safe – it didn’t, it looked like a great spinning Catherine wheel that might at any moment be torn off its base and go hurtling and fizzing all over the sky – but because it was familiar from his childhood. ‘What about that?’

  ‘OK,’ she shouted, through a mango-yellow mouth.

  Stephen had no head for heights. His stomach knotted as the bar clanged shut across their legs. Adam insinuated a small, sticky hand into his and he smiled reassuringly, and hoped he wasn’t going to be sick. Portrait of the intrepid war correspondent at play, he thought. They were whirled aloft, jerkily at first, then more smoothly as the carriages filled up. Finally, the wheel began to spin.

  He risked one look down. By the ticket booth was a group of people, disappointed this time, waiting for the next ride. Their faces, upturned to watch the spinning lights, looked like small pale flowers on long stalks. He shut his eyes as the chair swung beneath him, braced his already rigid arms and felt a rush of warmer air as they neared the ground.

  The third time round he felt Justine’s hand on his sleeve and turned to look at her. Her mouth was wide open but no sound came out, or none that he could hear above the blare of music. At firs
t he thought she was screaming, then realized she was laughing. He tried to speak, but the words were torn out of his mouth by the wind. They swooped down, down towards the flashing lights, and a strand of Justine’s hair came loose and whipped across her mouth. Adam, squashed in between them, shrieked, but seemed to be enjoying it. He was warm all along Stephen’s side, like a puppy, and had the grey wool, gym shoes and custard smell of little boys everywhere. Incredibly, Stephen was starting to enjoy the ride. He actually looked forward to that moment when he would see the whole fairground spread out between his feet, Adam’s fingers clutching his arm, Justine’s involuntary cry, and then the gasping headlong descent.

  When he got out he seemed to have rubber thigh bones, and wobbled about, not immediately sure where the ground was. ‘Would you like a beer?’ he shouted.

  ‘I’ll get it. I think Adam needs the loo.’

  ‘Do you, Adam?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked a bit white. Stephen put a hand on his shoulder and steered him off to the Portaloos at the other end of the field. ‘Did you feel sick?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘So did I.’

  He waited outside, but Adam seemed to take an enormously long time. He was worried until he remembered something Justine had said about Adam’s toilet rituals – one of them involved lining the bowl and seat with paper before he could bring himself to perform.

  Stephen didn’t mind waiting. He was thinking about Goya, about his love of visiting circuses, fiestas, fairs, freak shows, street markets, acrobatic displays, lunatic asylums, bear fights, public executions, any spectacle strong enough to still the shouting of the demons in his ears. Portrait of a man who’d come through. Looking round, it was clear why Goya’s self-medication had worked. Stephen felt dazed by the colours and shapes around him, by the way his bombarded senses began to assume each other’s functions, so that colour became noise and noise colour. All these mouths shouting, laughing, screaming, eating, drinking; mouths everywhere. You saw the mouths first, as you saw the mouths first in Goya’s paintings, combining to produce that roar that even in the Prado, off season, early in the morning, almost deafens you. But he didn’t want to think about Goya now. He was looking forward to the beer, hoping it would be cold, picturing the sweat of condensation on the can.

  When Adam came out, they looked round for Justine, but at first they couldn’t see her. He felt a tweak of anxiety as he stared along the queue, willing her to be in it. Passing faces now looked merely grotesque; he was aware of the dark open spaces outside the fairground, of the stars, pale in the lights, wheeling and turning in the chaos of space.

  Then he saw her standing under one of the huge lamps that lit the entrance to the car park. Moths attracted to the light fluttered all around her, so that she stood in a haze of white wings. Adam ran up to her, she handed Stephen a can of beer, and they walked through the car park, talking about where they should go.

  They set off down the road to a pizza bar, Adam trotting along between them and discussing Ferris wheels in his usual professorial manner. God knows what they made of him at school. Justine said he had tummy ache on Monday mornings, which suggested something was wrong. He’d be bullied, of course, had to be, and he’d be defenceless against it, unable to do anything except go on being his unacceptable self.

  Most of the outdoor tables were taken, but they found one close to the entrance, and sat looking out over the river with its floodlit bridges. Small candles flickered on every table, casting a warm glow over the circles of faces, finding answering points of light in raised glasses.

  Glancing round, Stephen noticed Peter Wingrave was sitting at a table in the far corner, with a man and a woman, both older than him, the woman heavily pregnant. He was facing away from the entrance and hadn’t noticed them come in. Deciding not to mention it to Justine, Stephen drummed his fingers on the cloth, while Adam read the entire menu through carefully three or four times before deciding to have what he always had – vegetarian lasagne.

  ‘Who’s driving?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘All right,’ Justine said. ‘But I want a drink when we get back.’

  He got up to get the drinks and coincided at the bar with Peter. Stephen was content to wait at the back of the crowd, giving Peter the opportunity of approaching him if he wanted or avoiding him if he didn’t. It was a bit awkward that he hadn’t yet responded to the stories. The rest – his antics in Kate’s studio, even his previous relationship with Justine – was not, strictly speaking, Stephen’s business.

  ‘Hi,’ Peter said, coming straight up to him.

  Peter looked well, Stephen thought, even slightly tanned, and then wondered why he was surprised. He’d expected somebody more obviously unbalanced. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Apart from the usual aches and pains.’ He smiled that fleeting and extremely charming smile. Not overused. In fact, rather carefully rationed. Stephen felt cynical and yet aware that cynicism was perhaps a shallow response to the capacities he sensed in Peter. ‘I’m gardening again. The first few weeks are always a bit tough.’

  ‘Oh. So you’re not working for Kate now?’

  ‘No, she’s virtually finished. And she’s a lot better – that manipulation under anaesthetic thing really worked. Apparently the improvement was dramatic. She said it might be. I can’t wait to see it.’

  This was all said smoothly, and perhaps he believed it. Perhaps Kate, not wanting the relationship to end unpleasantly, had given her improved mobility as the sole reason for ending the arrangement. ‘You must have plenty of gardening in this weather?’

  ‘God, yes. The phone never stops ringing.’

  ‘Good.’

  A pause. They looked around them.

  ‘I liked the stories.’ Liked was definitely not the right word, but then a crowded bar on a warm spring evening isn’t the place for precision. ‘I thought what I might do is photocopy them and send them to my agent with your address and then he can get in touch with you directly if he wants to pursue it.’

  ‘I could do the photocopying.’

  ‘It’s no problem. I’d rather they went off with a covering letter. I don’t want them ending up in the slush heap.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you.’

  Stephen shrugged. He hadn’t missed the flicker of speculation in Peter’s eyes. ‘But I don’t think he’s going to be interested in short stories. Though I suppose short stories do work as a first book, sometimes. McEwan.’ They were almost at the front of the queue. ‘Was McEwan an influence, by the way?’

  ‘He was a bit. Though you soon slough off influences that aren’t right for you.’

  It was a surprisingly confident speech for a young man. Stephen had a picture of a snakeskin, faded and paper thin, left behind on the sand, as the new gleaming skin emerged into the light. How many sloughed-off skins had there been so far? ‘Did you know those men? James. Reggie.’

  A wary laugh. ‘Ye-es, in the sense that I’ve known people like them. But you can’t take a character straight from life.’

  ‘So what do you do? How do you turn a real person into a fictional character?

  ‘Add bits of yourself.’

  ‘Really? I’m tempted to ask, “Which bits?”’

  ‘We all have a dark side.’ A banal little remark intended to end the conversation. Peter was looking out of the window at the corner of the courtyard where Justine and Adam were sitting. ‘Isn’t that Justine Braithewaite?’

  ‘Yes. The kid’s my nephew. She looks after him.’

  They looked at each other, Peter visibly registering that he didn’t know Stephen well enough to ask the question he wanted to ask. The pain in his eyes and the smile on his lips were an uncomfortable combination to witness. Stephen looked away. He’d loved her – whatever else was fake, that, at least, was real.

  A second later Stephen was able to say, ‘I think it’s your turn.’ And then he moved deliberately further along the bar so that they wouldn’t need to speak again.

&nbs
p; But when, an hour later, Justine said, ‘I think we ought to be going. Adam’s got school tomorrow,’ Peter immediately swung round to look in their direction, almost as if he’d heard what she said, though that was quite impossible. As Stephen counted out a tip, then followed her into the street, she turned and looked back, scanning the crowded tables. Peter was standing up under one of the tall lights, hair gleaming, face in shadow, watching her go.

  Twenty

  A man gets off a train, looks at the sky and the surrounding fields, then shoulders his kitbag and sets off from the station, trudging up half-known roads, unloading hell behind him, step by step.

  It’s part of English mythology, that image of the soldier returning, but it depends for its power on the existence of an unchanging countryside. Perhaps it had never been true, had only ever been a sentimental urban fantasy, or perhaps something deeper – some memory of the great forest. Sherwood. Arden. Certainly Stephen had returned to find a countryside in crisis. Boarded-up shops and cafés, empty fields, strips of yellow tape that nobody had bothered to remove even after the paths reopened, just as nobody had bothered to remove the disinfectant mats that now lay at the entrance to every tourist attraction, bleached and baking in the sun.

  The weather continued fine, amazingly warm for the time of year. Every morning he looked up at the trees and thought that today – with only a few more hours of sun – the green-gold haze on the branches would burst into leaf, but evening came and the trees were unchanged. He lived in the hollow of a green wave, knowing it couldn’t last, that it must end soon. These weeks seemed to have the shaped quality of the past.

  One evening he was standing in the garden looking into the copse, when he heard a cough behind him. Robert.

  ‘I came through. I did ring the bell, but I couldn’t make you hear.’

  Typical of Robert to emphasize that he hadn’t overstepped the bounds of propriety, but also typical that he didn’t assume he could enter the cottage whenever he chose merely because he owned it. Sometimes Stephen made an effort to see his brother as a stranger might, to discard the past faces that lay under the skin of this middle-aged face. The good little boy, breathing through his nose as he pushed a crayon across the page; the priggish adolescent – he had been priggish, surely? – this couldn’t be all sibling rivalry – the brash medical student who talked about diseased bowels till he made you want to puke. Shy at his wedding, proud at Adam’s christening and no doubt, in countless consultations, day after day, kind, sensitive, tenacious, efficient. A proper life. That was the way Stephen thought about Robert – a man who lived a proper life. By implication, a life unlike his own, and yet he didn’t regret his choice of career.