‘What would Paul say, if I got you mixed up in all this?’
‘What’s he going to say if you go off to Denmark and never come back?’
‘I’d sell the flat,’ Johnnie says, ‘but it takes time.’
‘You don’t need that much money. All you need is to get away somewhere for a while and calm down and work out what you’re going to do. And it’s easier to do that if you’ve got someone with you.’
I was going to say ‘someone you can trust’, but it sounded such a cliché that I couldn’t bring the words out. Also, I know Paul will have run me down in the trust stakes. I have got to be very careful, or Johnnie will be off and out of the door. I am not quite sure how long he’s been here. Things slow down when you’ve been drinking, or else they speed up.
‘We’ll go to Brighton,’ I say. It feels like an inspiration. ‘We’ll go to Brighton for a few days, and we’ll keep our heads down while I get the money organized.’
‘I don’t want to stay in an hotel. It’s too public.’
‘We’ll get a place of our own. This time of the year we can get a holiday let, there’ll be no problem.’
I’m thinking so fast it’s like a dream. In my mind I have the blinds drawn down and the answering machine winking, and we’re already on the platform at Victoria.
‘Just let me put a few things in a bag,’ I say. And he’s looking at me and his face is changing and growing softer, less certain. He doesn’t quite dare let himself hope yet, but soon he will. He’ll believe that I know what I’m talking about, and that I can get him out of all this mess he’s got himself into, and then when he wants to he can start it all again. I smile, as if to say, It’ll be fine. And he wants to believe me so much that he smiles back.
‘I’ve always liked Brighton,’ I say. ‘Make us some black coffee, Johnnie, while I get my things together.’
I go into my bedroom and start pulling drawers open. I can’t believe how excited I feel. For the first time in years I want the black coffee. I want to be sober. I know I am smiling.
Once, when I was cross with Anna, a long time ago, she said, ‘Be happy. I don’t like it when you look at me with that face.’
She made me laugh. We were all curled up on the sofa together, and she sang me a song she’d learned at school, one I didn’t know. She kept twining her hand in my hair: she loved that. Then she said, ‘I dreamed you lost me.’
‘I wouldn’t do that. Mums don’t lose their children.’
‘Sometimes they do.’
‘It was only a dream.’
She had her legs tucked up in my lap. She always had long, narrow feet, ever since she was born. I couldn’t get shoes to fit her in the shops. We had to order them. I tickled the sole of her foot, and her toes curled round my finger, and she was laughing. I knew how nervous she was, and how hard she took life sometimes. But I could still make her happy, and that was a wonderful feeling.
Twenty-one
Seven o’clock. A perfect morning, still and pale. The West Pier floats in mist on a flat silver sea, and beyond it the Palace Pier catches a stroke of early sun. Down on the path that runs across the lawns two whippets dance round their owner. He stands with his arms folded over his chest, waiting for them to calm down and crap on the grass. He’s poised on roller-blades, his arms folded over his chest, naked but for his shorts.
It’s only April, but the air is warm as you step out on to the balcony in your kimono. A freak early summer, filling the beaches with bodies. People lie in the lee of the breakwaters, getting up sometimes to look out to sea, their hands over their eyes, smiling. The whole beach shares that secret smile. You wouldn’t believe it was April, would you? It’s a gift, a string of days which you’ll always remember. You buy the papers, and all the mischief of the world has been pushed off the front pages by the sun.
The whippets leap around their master and he pushes off, one blade, then another, with the perfect balance of a clergyman on ice. He’s going fast. Round by the bike path, down on to the promenade and still gathering speed.
You used to roller-skate from dawn to dusk, tightening the metal nuts in the metal plate on the base of the skates, knotting the laces that snapped when you tugged them too hard. Those roller-skates were crude compared to the technology they have nowadays. Look at him, almost out of sight. But you loved it, on your skates all day so that when you had to take them off and come indoors you found yourself skating along the kitchen lino.
It was lucky getting this flat. It wasn’t the first one the girl at the letting agency thought of as she scrolled down her computer screen. There was a modern flat in a block near Churchill Square, but you didn’t fancy it from the photo. Too like London. It’s on the sixteenth floor, she said, you’ll have fantastic views. Or down the other end, they had a second-floor flat in Marine Parade. Or this —
This. Where you are now. The flat belonged to two sisters who died, one after the other, in June and August of last year. The heirs don’t want to sell yet. They’re waiting for property prices to rise, and they’re going to have some work done on the place, too, at the end of the summer. Meanwhile here it is, with most of the old ladies’ clutter moved out to reveal the big high rooms, the marble fireplaces, the walls in their various shades of white. You’ve got a kitchen and a sitting-room facing the sea, and the huge bedroom the sisters shared. But it’s a new bed, the letting agent assured you, knowing that you would think of the sisters dying there one by one. A king-size bed anchored into the centre of mirrors, marble, and a sheet of window looking over the complicated backs of houses.
You’ve taken the place for a month, paid in advance. You paid in cash. You’ve got sets of keys for the outer door and the three locks on the inner door. The old ladies were careful with locks and spy-holes, and the flat is on the second floor, so it’s not overlooked. It feels as private as a nest in the side of a cliff.
After she’d finished showing you everything, the letting agent stood in the middle of the sitting-room, looking around. Suddenly a doubt seized her. You saw it and thought it was about you. Johnnie wasn’t there, he was waiting in a café down the road, with the newspaper. You both thought it was better if he didn’t have anything to do with the letting people. ‘There’s just the two of us,’ you said. Did you look like the wrong sort of tenant, were you too eager, could she tell how much you wanted the flat?
She couldn’t. ‘Now you come to look at it,’ she said, ‘there’s not much furniture in here, is there? But we could always bring you along a few more chairs, and another sofa.’
‘No,’ you said quickly. ‘No, it’s fine. We like the space.’ You like what has been taken away. There’s no sense of former lives here, only of a flat like a ship’s prow pointed over lawns and sea. It floated there in the lovely white morning while the letting agent stood with her clipboard and computer printout.
‘The kitchen’s pretty basic, I’m afraid.’
‘We’ll probably be eating out most of the time.’
The French windows were open. The letting agent showed you how to operate the complicated Edwardian brass rod fasteners.
‘If the lock slips out and you can’t get it back in, give me a ring. We’ve got someone who goes round fixing things. Don’t try to do it yourself, because you can’t get these replaced for love or money.’
You stand on the balcony and the long sleeves of your kimono stir in the breeze, brushing silk over your arms. You like this kimono which covers a multitude of sins with grace. Here you are, you and Johnnie, holed up in this beautiful flat. You touch the hoary eleagnus in a black tub, which the old ladies must have grown. Beside it there are neat pots of feather-pink geraniums, put there by the agency. The girl told you how hard it is to keep flowers nice here.
‘Even in summer, it only takes one salt-storm. We have a contract with a garden centre, so any problems, they sort them out.’
The old ladies would have tapped their barometer and brought the pots in at night if it was falling. The barometer is
still there, on the kitchen wall. You’ve already tapped it this morning and it’s steady, at Fair.
∗
When the sun comes round the corner of the balcony, you go back into the kitchen, leaving the French door open wide. There is food in the fridge, and you take out a packet of frozen croissants, then turn on the oven to preheat. You’ll make breakfast in bed for Johnnie.
He’s sleeping more than he’s awake. Even though he goes to bed at nine, he sleeps on in the morning, like a thirsty man drinking a long glass of water, gulp by gulp. He wants to get away from everything, even from you. You can understand that, and it doesn’t bother you. You guard his sleep. In the morning you slip quietly out of bed, feeling for the kimono that’s rucked up in the duvet like a silk rag. You tiptoe out, leaving the door slightly ajar so you won’t have to wake him if you need to come back to the bedroom for anything. In fact you prefer the early mornings on your own. You’re used to solitude, and now that you’ve got someone in the next room, Johnnie drifting through his own solitude of sleep, there’s nothing to fear. You’ve got him to plan for now. There’s the luxury of thinking, ‘Later, we’ll have breakfast,’ or, ‘When Johnnie wakes up, we’ll go for a walk along the sea-front.’
You do go out. At first he didn’t want to.
‘No one knows you down here,’ you said, but Johnnie wasn’t sure.
‘There’s a lot of London people down here. You don’t know who you’re going to bump into.’
‘Put on your sunglasses and get a baseball cap,’ you suggested, and to your surprise he took it seriously, and sent you out to buy a baseball cap. ‘One with Nike on it or something.’
‘I never thought I’d see the day,’ you said, as he put it on. Baseball caps weren’t at all Johnnie’s style. He didn’t like being laughed at, but he never went out without the cap.
The croissants smell good. You put them on a tray with apricot jam, two plates, a pot of coffee and two beautiful pale-yellow coffee cups which you bought yourself because you couldn’t stand the ones the agency had provided. You think for a moment, then go back on to the balcony, pick two pink geraniums, put them in a little glass of water, and place them on the tray.
Johnnie is asleep. You put the tray down noiselessly on to the bedside table, and stand looking at him with the mixture of pity and envy you always feel for people when they’re sleeping. He’s huddled up, his face in the pillow. He’s got away where no one can follow him. But he likes having someone sleeping with him, because he has bad dreams and when he wakes up from them he doesn’t know where he is. Every night you tell him, ‘You’re in Brighton, remember?’ He sits bolt upright, staring, and demands as if it’s a matter of life and death, ‘Is it morning, or is it evening?’ ‘Hush,’ you say, ‘it’s the middle of the night. Go back to sleep.’
He’d carry on sleeping like that all morning if you let him. And why shouldn’t he? Well, no reason, except that you’re here with coffee and croissants. Or more than that, because of a feeling you don’t articulate to yourself. It’s the feeling that keeps you polishing the glasses from which you’re only going to get drunk again, that makes you scrub the bath no one else is ever going to see, and pat skin-cream into the loose flesh of your upper arms.
‘Johnnie.’
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing’s the matter. I’ve brought you your coffee, that’s all.’
He relaxes, turning so that he lies back on the pillows with his eyes shut. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Time you were up. It doesn’t do you any good, lying in bed half the morning.’
He squints at the watch on your arm. ‘It’s only nine o’clock.’
‘Yes, but it’s a lovely day. I’ve been sitting out on the balcony. Just think, in April.’
‘We’re not on holiday, Lou.’
‘Why not? We’re not working, as far as I can see. We’ve got plenty of money. Why shouldn’t we be on holiday?’
He takes a croissant, splits it with his thumb, and loads it with butter and apricot jam. He doesn’t drop a crumb. Just like Paul, they both have that cat-like neatness. You like watching him eat, and it doesn’t seem to put him off. He takes three croissants, one after the other, and three cups of coffee.
‘Aren’t you eating, Lou?’
‘No. I’m trying to lose a bit of weight.’
Because suddenly it seems worth trying. You can change gross slabs of flesh back into curves. You can release your face from the fat that pushes each feature slightly out of shape. You aren’t meant to be like this. It’s just a mistake that happened when you weren’t looking. If you try you can get yourself back.
Johnnie rests on white pillows, with white sheets crumpled round him. You kick off your mules and lie down too, beside him, staring up at the white ceiling where there are echoey shadows of sea-light. You shut your eyes and it feels as if the bed is moving. You’ve always wanted to sleep outside.
You say to Johnnie, without opening your eyes, ‘When I was a kid I used to dream about having a bed outside, and going to sleep in it, and nobody being able to see me. In the playground, or in the middle of the park. Whenever I wanted it, there it would be, and I could just climb in and get down under the covers.’
He doesn’t answer. You settle yourself more comfortably, wriggling deep into the bed but not touching him. You’ve slept together every night in this bed since you came to Brighton. The time seems endless, in the way holiday time does, until you come home and your two weeks snap shut like a telescope.
You don’t touch him. You feel tender and exposed, as if you’ve been ill for a long time and you’re just coming back to life. Johnnie’s the same, recovering from something you don’t know about and don’t want to know about. Neither of you has the energy for anything more. What you want is the taste of morning bread, like a miracle, and the smell when boiling water spatters on ground coffee. You want to spend long hours absorbing this view of the tide coming in, or going out, or lying slack at low water and exposing the stretch of hard sand that lies below the pebbles. You want to watch tiny, far-away children lug their buckets to the edge of the water and back to the holes they’ve made in the sand. You want to be too far away to know if they’re laughing or crying.
You hear the sea all night long, far away, but as close as the blood punching its way around your bodies as they lie separate in the big white bed. You lie awake, and Johnnie sleeps, or pretends to sleep. You think of Anna. Two nights ago the wind got up and you heard a gull through it, sounding like a child who is hoarse with crying. But you knew you’d never left Anna to cry, not once. You could swear it. And you felt rather than saw Johnnie in the bed, at your side. For the first time you thought that Johnnie should be awake and listening too. He should hear that voice that sounds like Anna’s, worn out by crying, and he should listen and listen for it to come again.
But of course you didn’t wake him. You lay there hoping that the wind would the down. You wanted to get out of bed and slip through to the kitchen and have a drink, just one, to steady yourself. And then you’d be able to hear that the wind was simply the wind, and nothing more.
But you didn’t move. You lay there, telling yourself that tomorrow the needle on the barometer would rise when you tapped the glass, and the sea would be shining.
‘Or I used to pretend the bed was out in the country, in a field somewhere, with long grass and flowers by the hedges. The grass would be flowering too, and bowing down every time there was a breeze. And I’d lie there all day long, and watch the birds flying and the clouds going past.’
Johnnie grunts, and subsides deeper into the bed. You roll over and thump the pillow by Johnnie’s head, on a rare impulse of violence towards him.
‘Come on, you idle bugger. Time to get up.’
Twenty-two
For the first time, David’s come up to the barn. Anna thinks it’s safe. Sonia heads off up the track soon after ten every morning, and she’s away for hours, learning to ride. At first the
re was the threat that Anna would have to go too, but not any more. Sonia disappears with a tight, secret face, saying to anyone who wants to listen, ‘If I don’t put the hours in now, I’ll never get anywhere.’ It’s better without her, and Paul doesn’t seem bothered. Some days he goes away, to London or to Leeds, and even when he’s at home he’s upstairs in the office most of the time, leaving the house light and free for Anna. She makes her own lunch, fish fingers and Stringfellows out of the freezer. Sonia’s given her five pounds to go up to the village if there’s anything else she needs, and left her the phone number of the stables in case of emergency. Sonia has a sense of responsibility, unlike some.
Anna keeps the number in her jeans pocket, along with the letter from her mother. She clears a corner of the kitchen table, blobs ketchup on to her plate, and eats in luxury. The place is getting messy, like a real house. Anna drops chips on the flags, and lets them lie there. Sonia is always talking about rats. That’s why she cleans so much, because she’s afraid of them.
‘You could come up to our house for tea,’ says David. ‘Mum said I was to ask you.’
‘I can’t. I’ve got to be here, because of the kitten.’
The kitten’s doing well. David reckons it’ll live, and he knows about animals. He holds the little thing firmly and looks into its eyes, its nose, its ears. He says it’s male. It’ll be a tom-cat. Anna keeps its box in her room at night now, just under her bed, where she can reach down and touch it. In the box she’s put a fur collar that belonged to David’s great-grandmother. Kittens thrive if they can rub theirselves up against something soft, David says.
‘You can make a lamb think anything’s its mother, as long as you put a sheepskin over it.’
‘I’ll cook tea for us,’ says Anna. ‘I’ve got sausages in the freezer, and Sonia’s not going to be back till nine tonight.’
‘Is she up at the stables?’