There was a long silence. Slowly, Donald sat down in the chair opposite me.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. And I knew what he was sorry for. He was sorry that I had changed and I could not change back. I couldn’t even take the hand he had laid on the table between us, half-way, half-open.
FOURTEEN
In the dark before dawn time belongs to no one. I lie on my back and listen to Donald’s breathing. I can hardly hear it. He must be deep in his dreams. But day is coming, and even as I watch it becomes not quite dark. Our wardrobe bulks against the wall. My suit and clean white shirt hang in there, ready. It’s not even a uniform; it’s just a disguise, a cheap copy of what men wear. Clothes for a day where all the hours have been sold and belong to someone else.
But I steal back an hour, even if it means I don’t get enough sleep. I’m out of the house in jeans and one of Donald’s sweaters, snicking the door shut with the key so it won’t bang and wake them. It’s dawn now. The grass is wet with dew and starlings fly up as I come out, then settle again, cautiously, watching me as I go down to the gate. They cock their heads and fix me with their lizard eyes. I don’t like starlings, I never have.
The hollows of the fields are full of mist, which wraps round me as I walk so that soon the house is hidden. A circle of visibility moves forward with me, like a hoop around my hips. Sheep thump away across the field. They cry their blundering cries, then they forget about danger and through the mist I hear their teeth tearing at the close-bitten grass.
The mist smells of marsh. Sometimes, walking on the drained fields, you forget that marsh was everywhere once, and it’s waiting to come back. The sea’s penned back, but it wants to rise. They say the climate’s changing. That’ll be its chance. Two miles down the coast there’s a boggy place where the ribs of a wooden ship stick up through reeds and cotton-grass. I don’t know how it came there, or how big it is. It might be a fishing-boat. Maybe there was a flood once and the ship sailed in on it and was wrecked here. There are buried ships on what was the sea-floor, and they rise up through the bog as if through water. The bog preserves everything: butter, bodies, boats.
I tried to get close enough to the ship to touch it. I thought I was going to make it but then my foot went through a tuft of grass into a cold soup that rose to the top of my thigh. And then the bog tightened on my leg like an iron band. I was lucky. I didn’t fall forward. I threw my weight backward and left my boot in the bog and crawled out soaking wet. Water doesn’t frighten me, but the bog does. I saw how I could have drowned in it, still not believing it.
Our house lay empty for two years before we moved in. That’s why it was in such a bad state, and why we got it cheap. We couldn’t believe no one had wanted it.
‘Some people find it quiet down here,’ was all the estate agent said. He was getting out of the car, and he had his back to us as he said it. In the village shop they said it was nice we’d come. It had looked as if the house was going to be left to the wind and weather. But there was a girl in the shop stacking the shelves, a Saturday girl, and as she packed my box she looked straight at me and said, ‘I wouldn’t want to live down your end.’ Her made-up face was impassive. Her hands moved fast, fitting in cornflakes, baked beans and tomato paste.
‘Wouldn’t you?’ Why did I need her to like the house? She wasn’t going to live in it. It was ours. But she didn’t answer. She smiled slightly, as if we both knew something but weren’t telling, and went on tucking matches and clothes-pegs into the corners of the box. That’s village life: it doesn’t make room for you. Everyone’s packed in already, and there aren’t any gaps. But the tang of salt swept over the marshes and through the open shop doorway. It was the wind that rotted cloth and rusted cars and burned the leaves off trees, and would pick an empty house to the bone in a couple of winters. It worked through every season, scouring the marsh flat so as to show the beautiful curves of the earth. I smiled at the girl and met her eyes. She had to pause and look back at me.
‘I was here a long time ago,’ I said. ‘Before you were born,’ and I wrote out a cheque, picked up the box and carried it out to the car. It felt like going on holiday, with an armful of small, necessary things. Matches and salt and candles. We would have everything we needed, whatever happened.
I walk on. The mist seems to be thickening, not thinning, until I reach the sea-wall and climb the steps to the top. Up here the air is clear. Down below me, on the seaward side, the little waves mamble at pebbles. It’s lonely here, that’s why the girl didn’t like it. I don’t know if I like it or not, but I am at home. I stand for a long time, watching the waves flex, turn, collapse. The water runs in among the stones, drains, floods back. There is a bone-white stick at the edge of the water. It stirs with every incoming wave, but never floats free. I watch for a while but it is lodged by something I can’t see. A big stone under the water, perhaps.
I don’t know what it is that makes me turn. You do get walkers down here sometimes, following the coastal path, missing the sign that should take them inland instead of along the sea-wall. I turn. There is a man coming towards me, along the sea-wall. He walks steadily, head-down, as if he knows the way. I’m not worried. One of the things I decided when we left London was that I would not allow myself to be frightened here. You can use up a lifetime on being afraid. I was going to walk alone wherever I wanted.
I move slightly, towards the steps, so as to be out of his way. We won’t even need to say good-morning if we don’t want to. He’s fifty yards off now, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched and head down. A big man in a dark tracksuit with its hood pulled up. Although there is no mist up here there is a graininess in the air which makes it hard to see his face. Anyway he’s looking down. But walking very fast. And moving loose-limbed, like –
My body knows before I do. My foot is down, on the step. I should run but the air is sticky round me, the mist congealed to greasy wool. I turn and he is with me.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Hi, Simone.’ My name swells between us into an object so solid I could put out my hand and touch it. As if he is naming me for the first time. Simone. It leaves his mouth as breath, and enters me. It is no longer solid, but a net, spreading as it falls. And I am caught.
He doesn’t touch me. He stops six feet away. If we stretched out our hands our fingers would brush. He is a big man, bulky in the shapeless tracksuit, breathing hard. He pushes back the hood. And then he vanishes, the man I’ve carried in my head for years though I never looked at him. He is swallowed up like a caterpillar in the chrysalis of now, as it splits before my eyes. Eyes, nose, lips. The look which used to swing to greet me, watchful, guarded. But not always like that. Not always watchful, not always guarded. He could be as sweet as my own children. I still feel his skin, his flesh, so young, the sweat lathered on it, swimming in my arms to lose itself deep in my body. His head back, his throat exposed, his eyes shut.
He has consumed himself. He has made himself not exist any more in this middle-aged man with bulky flesh and face. He has lost his fine sharpness. He is loose and blurred, like a photograph out of focus, stickered with a note from the laboratory that tells you where you’ve gone wrong. I look for what I knew before. I see his eyes, the mist of sweat on his forehead as he pushes back the hood. The hair is crisp, greying. I never knew Michael’s hair would curl like that when it was cut short.
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘I saw you leave the house.’
‘You were watching me.’
‘Sure I was watching you. How else would I have known where to find you?’
His face creases into a smile, inviting me to share it.
‘But you didn’t come across the field,’ I say, working it out aloud.
‘There’s another path, from the village.’
‘I know there is.’ But he shouldn’t know that. He must have been watching a while, getting to know the place. Staying nearby? Who’s he met? Who’s he talked to?
‘You don’t look a day different,
’ he says. He is watching me intently behind the genial half-smile that stays on his face as if he’s forgotten to switch it off.
‘I think I do. Twenty years different.’
‘No. No–oo. I would have known you anywhere.’
I am terribly afraid. My body pounds out fear. He mustn’t guess it. That’s why he’s come like this, so he’ll catch me off-guard. What does he want to make me do?
Then I do it. I look at the bulk, the tracksuit, the flesh that carries on it the fat of poverty, and I say: ‘You’ve been in prison.’
He sighs deeply, as if in relief, looking me straight in the eyes.
‘It’s like I said, Simone, I could never hide anything from you.’
‘What was it?’
He shrugs vaguely. I smell his sharp smell, the sweat I used to lick off him. My memory short-circuits and I taste him, the way he was. I taste his semen, chalky, marine. I stare at him and he fills my mouth. Look. He’s afraid too. He’s jumping with adrenalin.
‘Not the way you mean it,’ he says. ‘I never committed any crime. I just had to go away from people for a while.’
‘You had to go away from people for a while,’ I repeat, trying to match the cadence of his voice. I don’t know what he means, and he looks at me as if I should know everything.
‘I was sick,’ he says. ‘Depressed.’
‘You were in a hospital?’
‘Yeah.’ He wipes his forehead. ‘For a while.’ He looks up and adds quickly, ‘I was a voluntary patient.’ A long pause. Voluntary. He volunteered. It makes no sense to me. We registered for the draft. He smiles suddenly. ‘But it was hard to get out of there because they made it all so easy. They did your thinking for you. You keep on telling everyone you don’t belong there, but they won’t listen. They don’t know how to any more. All they know about is being doctors and nurses.’
‘That doesn’t sound like a good hospital.’
He moves his shoulders slightly, as if shrugging something off them. ‘Maybe it was what I wanted,’ he says.
‘How long were you in there?’
‘A while, the first time.’ He stops, looks at me. ‘It wasn’t voluntary the first time. I told you a lie, Simone. I was going through a lot of stuff. Nothing you’d want to know about.’
I don’t contradict him. The chill of the mist rises round and I suppress a shiver. He won’t feel it, he’s a big man. But all the same I have the terrible feeling that he isn’t solid at all. I could look through him, through the heavy flesh, the yellow marbled layers of fat, and pluck out the man he was. If I held his hand, would I feel the original grip? The touch of his fingers, with little nicks and hard places on them from his work. But I’m not going to.
‘How did you know, Simone?’
‘What?’
‘That I’d been hospitalized. That I’d been in an institution.’
‘I didn’t know. It was just a guess.’
‘You must’ve seen a lot of people who’ve been in jail.’
‘That’s different.’
‘But isn’t it what you thought? It was the first thing you said. If I’d told you yes you’d have believed me.’
‘It was a guess,’ I say.
‘You’re a good guesser.’
‘Not so good. I can’t guess why you’re here.’
I look at him straight and hard, as if he’s someone else. Minutely, his face flinches and hardens. He really must have believed I would feel differently when I saw him. I’ve got to be careful now.
‘It’s been so long,’ I say, and I let myself smile very slightly, for the first time.
‘I know it.’ He turns and looks north. That’s your house there.’
‘You know it is.’
‘And your boys. Good-looking boys.’
I cannot speak. I can’t say anything about Joe and Matt to Michael. I don’t want to believe that he has seen them, that his eyes have touched them. They are another life and the two lives can’t meet without one flying apart. I would gag on saying their names to him. He steps forward, puts his hand on my arm.
‘You have to help me, Simone.’
His hand lies on my arm. It is heavy and it could tighten. He looks sloppy but he could tear me to pieces.
‘How do you mean, help you?’
He takes his hand off me, laughs. ‘Don’t be like that. I didn’t mean anything. It’s OK. Don’t be paranoid.’
I haven’t heard that word for a while. Paranoid. And Michael would not have used it before. I see him face to face with a doctor, across a desk. The doctor writing something, then waiting, her face professionally smooth. The apparent relaxation of Michael’s body masking his coiled wariness. He must have been a difficult patient, hard to judge, sitting there with his blue-collar body and his intelligence sunk down deep behind his eyes. ‘So that’s why you came?’ I ask. To tell me everything’s OK?’
‘No, I didn’t come here for that. Why would I lie to you? You can see how it is.’ And he offers his hands to me, palms upwards, in the old gesture of nothing, of emptiness. I have no weapon. I can do you no harm. Trust me.
‘So tell me why you did come.’
‘Give me a minute, Simone. I don’t feel so good.’ And he doesn’t. There’s a glaze of sweat on his forehead and upper cheeks. He is pallid, sick from a cause I don’t want to know. Put him on the street squatted on an old blanket with a mongrel at his side and I’d throw twenty pence into his cup. But he was mine. Michael breathes heavily, his shoulders rounding, hunched, protecting himself. Automatically and without wanting to, I find myself checking him as if he’s one of the children. The way he’s breathing, the rasp and wheeze of it –
‘Have you got an inhaler?’
‘Mm. Back at the motel.’
‘Just relax.’ I put my hand on his arm. ‘Don’t struggle to breathe.’ He bends over, sucking at the air. Something’s triggered this. He never used to be ill. Sick.
‘It’s all right,’ I say. I could run now. I could be down those steps and across the fields and he’d never catch me. He couldn’t run twenty yards in this state. But I don’t move. His breathing quietens slowly, and he lowers himself and sits on the ground. I kneel down opposite him. Sharp pebbles dig through my jeans.
‘You OK now?’
‘Better.’ After a while he smiles and says, ‘I’m just an old man, Simone. I can’t even take my boat out any more. Once I’m out on the ocean I get afraid. It feels like the water’s closing in around me.’ For a second there’s a fellow-feeling between us which has nothing to do with the past or the present. It’s just the feeling of flesh for flesh, as meaningless or not as the smile you give a stranger on a sunny morning.
‘It’ll pass,’ he says. ‘That’s what they say. I have to keep on doing these relaxation exercises.’ He offers me a small, cynical, complicit smile. His eyes lock on mine as they used to do when he knew everything and I knew nothing. I look through them into the dark fields of the night where he used to take me.
‘Why’d you come?’ I say.
‘I had to come.’
FIFTEEN
‘You had to come.’ We walk slowly, side by side, along the sea-wall, above the wrinkled sea. I look at my watch and see that it is still early. Scarcely any time has passed.
‘I had to see you.’
‘You had something to tell me? Was that it?’
He stops and I stop too. We face one another.
‘You can’t tell these things, Simone,’ he says in a low voice. ‘I say to you I was in hospital. What does that mean?’ He clears his throat. ‘It’s taken me all this while to tell myself what happened. Stuff I’d never looked at. Never dared look. It was like opening the furnace door then jumping back because the flames lick out and burn you. And so you slam it shut and tell yourself it’s not there. But it keeps on burning until you’re burnt away inside.’
‘You’re talking about yourself,’ I say.
‘Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.’ He looks at me out of the heavy grey
face that isn’t beautiful any more. ‘I tell you, Simone, there were things in that furnace there I would die before I touched. Things I did and I never looked at them again. I had ways of getting around my mind without looking at half what was inside it. Did you ever play that game when you were a kid, where you have to get around a room without touching the floor?’
‘No. There wasn’t enough furniture.’
He gives me a sharp, gleaming glance. ‘No kidding?’
‘No kidding. We weren’t all born in the richest country on earth.’
‘You haven’t changed, Simone.’
‘Of course I’ve changed.’
An oil tanker crawls east over the quiet sea. I think of the quiet ignitions it’s destined for. No sheet of flame swallowing the surface of the water. Michael sighs. I hear him draw in a deep, shaky breath. He goes on in a low, close voice with the laughter burnt out of it. ‘I used to wake at five every morning and watch that square of window coming blue. If I kept watching I’d see a bird flick across, too fast to know what kind it was. For a while if I really tried I could still imagine what the air was like out there. Blue so wet it looks as if it’ll come off on your hands like paint. But then I got too tired and there was just the room and the window and a mess of noise as everybody else in the building woke up. Get up, make the bed, go to the bathroom. Take a shower in a stall that’s open at the front so the attendant can walk up and down and watch us. Did you know you can commit suicide with a shower-head, Simone?’ He kicks small pebbles and they rattle away down the sea-wall.
‘But you got out.’
He pinches a fold of flesh above his waist. ‘I ate my way out.’
‘What?’
‘I was the Donut King of Thoreau Ward. Once I got over two hundred pounds and stopped watching the window they let me out. But they told me I could go back any time I wanted. You think that’s stupid, don’t you, Simone? You think the last thing anybody would want is to go back? You don’t understand. Once you’ve been in those places there’s a part of you that always belongs there.’