‘Like this one here. The front has split. That’s the most common damage you get. I take the front off and reglue it, then varnish and polish. You’d never know it had been broken. See this? It’s a Jesse Dennis, made in the 1820s. I picked it up at a car boot sale in Brighton, I gave him £40 cash for it, only a year or so ago. By the time I’m done with it that’ll be a valuable instrument.’
‘Will you sell it?’
‘Most likely send it up to Bonham’s for auction.’
Meg looks round the shed and pictures Matt at work here evening after evening, all on his own. There’s a kettle, a water keg, a radio, an electric heater. A kitchen chair. A stack of newspapers. It’s a little world in here.
‘You must miss your dad,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
He’s looking down at the floor. Without a word, without any special expression on his face, she can still pick up how much he misses his father. There’s a delicacy about him that she respects.
An electric bell buzzes sharply, two buzzes.
‘That’s Mum,’ he says.
‘Does it mean she wants you?’
‘Yes.’
He makes no move to leave the shed. Instead he takes down another of his violins, rests it on his shoulder, and starts to tune the strings.
‘Don’t mind about me. If you need to go to her.’
‘She can wait.’
He completes the tuning.
‘This is Handel.’
He launches into a skipping, leaping tune that turns teasing and lyrical as he plays on. He plays with a slight frown on his face, swaying his body to the movements of his bow-arm. The sound is powerful, rich, inspirational. Listening to it Meg feels that even she, defiled as she is, can be cleansed and redeemed.
When Matt plays the violin he is no longer a big slow awkward man, lumbering through her flat in his socks. He becomes sure and graceful. The music flows from him as if it’s the pure expression of his spirit.
The bell rings again. He stops playing.
‘She won’t let me alone,’ he says. ‘I’d better go to her. You stay here. I won’t be long.’
He leaves her in the shed.
Meg sits on the only chair and waits for his return. As she waits she thinks about him, and how easy she finds it to be with him. It’s because he’s so unassertive, maybe. You don’t have to be any kind of person with him to feel you’re … what?
To feel he approves of you. To feel he likes you.
So do I want him to like me?
All at once she confronts the obvious simple fact that has been present throughout, the fact that more than any other makes her feel at ease in his company: Matt is courting her.
She doesn’t know how else to express it. She could say: he loves me and wants me to love him; but the claim is too great. This is a tentative process. A courtship. Extraordinary as it seems, she is quite sure she’s right. It’s not so much what he says or does as the feeling he gives her about herself. He makes her feel approved.
This changes everything. Ridiculously she finds she now feels nervous. What is there to be afraid of? And yet when he returns to the shed she knows she’ll blush and not be able to look him in the eye. She’s never been able to flirt. The thought that some form of modest flirting might be appropriate paralyses her.
What she needs now is to be in his company while other things are going on. Alone together is frightening. She fears her own social incompetence, she knows that under pressure she’ll freeze up. Better to be with him among other people.
So I want to be with him, then?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. No doubt about that. This good man’s admiration and respect is what she craves. His strong arm can pull her up out of the pit into which she has fallen. How wonderful, how providential, that he should enter her life on the same day that Tom left it.
Still not back from seeing to his old mother. Maybe she’s had a fall. Maybe it’s an emergency and Matt can’t leave her until an ambulance comes. Better to join them in the house. At least that way they won’t be alone together.
Odd how now that I think of him that way I don’t want to be alone with him.
She turns off the electric heater and finds the light switch, turning off the lights as she pulls the shed door shut behind her. The glow from the kitchen window throws a long beam across the garden, guiding her to the back door. The door is ajar.
As she comes close she hears raised voices from within. Matt is shouting at his mother.
‘You don’t know anything!’ he’s shouting. ‘I’m not listening to you because you don’t know anything!’
‘What’s she doing out in that shed with you?’ says Mrs Early, her voice shrill and undaunted. ‘She’s no better than she should be.’
‘Just shut up! I’m not listening to this!’
‘I know her type. She can see what a big fool you are. She’ll get what she wants out of you, no trouble. I’m only trying to warn you, Matthew. Women like her eat big fools like you for dinner.’
‘I’m not listening. I’m going back to my shed.’
Meg, listening, backs away from the door. She doesn’t want to be alone with Matt. She doesn’t want to be anywhere with Matt. His mother has seen what he doesn’t see: she’s no better than she should be. Women see that sort of thing. She saw it right away. She saw the signs all over her body, the body she had given so wantonly to Tom even though he cared nothing for her. She could smell her desperation.
Matt comes out, shaking with anger, and finds Meg in the back garden, shaking too, with the cold.
‘I have to go,’ she says quickly.
‘No!’
It comes out like a cry of anguish.
‘Thank you so much.’
She hurries into the kitchen. He comes after her.
‘Let me give you something. A cup of tea.’
‘No, really. I have to go now.’
She can think of no excuse, and sees she needs none. The look of agony on his face tells her he understands. She heard his mother’s taunts.
‘You mustn’t pay any attention to her,’ he says to her. ‘She’s not all there.’
But she’s sharp enough to know trash when she sees it.
‘It’s not that,’ says Meg.
Impossible to say what it is. Impossible to say, I’m dirty and you’re clean.
‘I can hear every word,’ says Mrs Early from the lounge.
‘You keep out of this,’ says Matt.
‘I have to go,’ says Meg, moving towards the lounge.
Matt reaches out and seizes hold of her wrist. Meg stops still. For a moment, in silence, they stand looking at each other. Matt’s face pleads with her, his pain unconcealed. But he can’t speak, because his mother can hear every word. And anyway, what is there to say? So the moment passes and he releases his hold on her. He drops his head, looking down at the floor.
‘Don’t go,’ he says.
‘Sorry,’ says Meg.
She goes through the lounge, not looking at Mrs Early, to the front door. She opens it herself.
‘Can I call you?’ he says.
‘If you want,’ she says.
She goes quickly down the path to the gate. She glances back at Matt and sees him standing there, half in, half out. He lifts one hand in a silent gesture of farewell. Meg goes out onto the street where her car is parked.
As she drives away she looks again and there he still is, frozen in the bright doorway, watching her go.
37
Above the line of the Downs, low in the sky, there rises an irregular band of night-dark cloud, like the battlements of a castle. Above this lies a narrow strip of empty sky, which is a pale and almost colourless blue. Higher still, dominating the landscape, an immense canopy of quilted cloud moves majestically westward, a rippled blanket of dove grey and slate grey and black.
Tom Redknapp, up before the rest of the family, sits alone at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee warming his hands and watches the pre-dawn sky. He has n
ot turned on the lights in the kitchen. The giant sweep of clouds across the land suits his present fatalistic mood. He feels himself to be in the grip of events beyond his power to control. Somehow, without having ever intended to do harm, he has brought misery to the two women he most wants to please. And as a result he himself has lost everything. No doubt this is a right and proper punishment, but it still makes no sense to him. It feels more like a whim of the gods, not the stern Christian God so much as the cantankerous deities of Greek legend, who in the course of quarrelling among themselves wreak havoc on random human lives.
This makes him think of a summer long ago when the family went on holiday to Greece. The olive groves below Delphi, like a grey-green inland sea. The tumble-down columns of Olympia lying like park benches among the weeds. Most of all the heat. Belinda wore a wide-brimmed hat, the brim a fine lattice through which the sun cast a pattern of bright speckles on her sweet face. Not a ruins person, Belinda, but she bore it for his sake, knowing he had wanted to go for so long. Ancient history for him, a villa with a pool for her and the children, that was the deal. Though truth to tell he wasn’t sorry himself when they came to rest on the island. He finds he’s forgotten the name of the island, though he remembers the pool, with its view over the Aegean. And he remembers their bedroom.
It’s all about trust in the end. Marriage too is a deal, you don’t leave me and I won’t leave you. It’s the assurance you both need to dare to build a home together and to have children, because that home, those children, will be for ever after hostages. Lose them and lose all.
The colours are changing in the sky. The high heavy mass of cloud is now edged with pink, its ribs glowing pink, the shadows between them still a deep grey. The band of clear sky is widening and becoming more blue. A plane crosses, trailing a tail of vapour. The high cloud, the roof of the world, continues to deepen in colour as he watches, the pink darkening to rose. All this so slowly that no change is visible, nothing but the little plane moving, and yet the whole world is being reborn before his eyes.
Now a single cloud the shape of a French loaf sails across the blue band of sky.
Everything changes. All the time. I grow older. The children leave home. Nothing is for ever. A marriage grows, a marriage changes. Is that so terrible?
Don’t take this away from me.
He means his home, his memories, their love, their history, everything they’ve built together. Isn’t this little world of theirs in which they’ve invested so much, isn’t it too substantial, too founded and rooted to be overthrown by so small a thing as a passing office affair?
Except it wasn’t small, was it? Not so much a passing affair as an earthquake. A lifetime’s longing made flesh. Desire in action.
Oh, Meg. I never meant to hurt you. You who’ve given me the most intense joy of my life.
Only sex, they say. Only sex. Jesus, if they only knew.
Santorini, that was the name of the island. The children still small enough then to be in bed before dinner, though you never quite knew when one of them would reappear saying they couldn’t sleep. Usually they were well down by nine. The rooms had no air-conditioning, so they slept under a sheet. By the morning the sheets were kicked off and lay in a white tangle on the floor.
He remembers those warm nights. Belinda naked on the bed beside him in the moonlight.
Sunrise coming. The rim of cloud on the horizon now shining gold. The sky above deep blue. The high cloud roof turning a muddy mauve, its ribs and hollows gone. The French loaf stretching, fragmenting, forming a long broken stripe of cloud that catches the unseen sun and glows, dazzles.
There are forces at work in the world that are beyond my power to control. I can’t soften Belinda’s anger or heal her wounds. What’s done is done. All I can do is tell her again the simple truth.
I still love you as much as ever.
Here comes the sun. The high canopy of cloud burns away. All colour drains from the sky. Only this blinding dominating light that floods the universe.
Dazzled, Tom turns his head away from the window and finds the kitchen raked with brilliance. His coffee mug throws a long sharp-edged shadow over the table. Wine glasses glitter on the sideboard. Hanging copper pans glow with fire. The far wall is luminous with sunshine: this winter dawn in Sussex as radiant as high noon over the Aegean.
Belinda comes down to breakfast fully dressed, and finds Tom sitting in the kitchen in his bathrobe. They’ve hardly talked since the weekend. It’s like they’ve come to this agreement to act as if nothing’s happened. Tom’s been doing long hours at work, she’s hardly seen him. And what is there to say that hasn’t already been said?
I could tell him about Kenny.
She almost laughs aloud. She spent all day yesterday not thinking about Kenny. The very thought of telling Tom makes her feel dizzy with shame.
Then there he is in his stripy bathrobe looking all lost and alone. It’s quite touching in its way. Or it would be if he wasn’t such a tosser.
‘How long have you been down here?’
‘I’ve been watching the sky,’ he says. ‘I saw the whole dawn.’
‘Nice for you.’ But that sounds mean. ‘How was it?’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever watched all of a dawn before. It makes you feel, oh, you know. Close to eternity.’
She pads about the sun-filled kitchen putting on the kettle, getting out bread for toast, reaching down the honey. Close to eternity. That’s not the way he talks usually. But once again she feels touched.
‘Do you want some coffee?’ She sees he has a mug. ‘Some more coffee?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I should get dressed.’
But he doesn’t move. He’s watching her. It’s like he’s waiting for her to tell him about Kenny. Which is ridiculous because he knows nothing, and doesn’t need to know.
‘I did something so stupid,’ she says.
I don’t believe this. I’m going to tell him. Why am I doing this? This is not a good idea.
But on she goes, quite unable to stop herself.
‘Did I ever tell you about Kenny?’
‘Kenny who?’
‘A boy I knew a million years ago. When I was seventeen. Anyway, we got back in touch the other day.’
She’s watching herself, fascinated, horrified.
Just how much am I going to tell? I’m a runaway train. Hold on to your seat belts. Adopt the brace position.
‘He asked me to meet up with him. At the Gatwick Hilton. So I did.’
‘The Gatwick Hilton? That’s a crap hotel.’
‘Oh, Tom.’
She almost laughs. He’s offended because she did it in a crap hotel.
‘Anyway, there he was. Lying on the bed.’
‘In the Gatwick Hilton? Why?’
Slow off the mark, Tom. But you’ll get there.
‘He thought it was a date.’
‘When was this?’
‘Tuesday.’
‘Tuesday!’
She’s watching his face. He’s putting it together, working out what it all means. Slide over the details, for Christ’s sake. Don’t say too much.
‘How do you know he thought it was a date?’
Because of the details. One of them, at least.
‘Remember I was just so pissed off with you. Which I still am. For being such a fucking fucker.’
‘Yes.’ He concedes the point. ‘I’ve not forgotten.’
‘So I go into the room, and there he is, lying on the bed.’
‘In the Gatwick Hilton.’
She starts laughing, without knowing why. Except that it’s hilarious. And horrible. Tom starts laughing too, and he certainly doesn’t know why. He’s laughing because she’s laughing.
‘He’s lying on the bed,’ he prompts.
‘And he’s naked.’
‘Naked!’
‘And he’s got this great big hard-on.’
‘This great big—!’
Tom explodes with laughter.
/> ‘He’s naked and he’s bald and I hardly even recognize him,’ says Belinda, ‘and he’s lying there with his dick in the air on this bed in the Gatwick Hilton and he says, “Surprise, surprise!”’
She can’t go on. She’s laughing too much.
‘He actually said that? “Surprise, surprise”?’
She nods, tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks.
‘He called it Matey.’
‘Matey? No! He couldn’t have!’
‘I swear to you. He’d taken some Viagra. He said, “Matey’s good for hours.”’
Tom rocks back and forth hugging his knees with laughter. They’re laughing together like they laughed in the old days, and somehow everything feels right again. Except he doesn’t know the rest of it.
‘Oh, Tom,’ she says. ‘I’m such a fool.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I don’t want to tell you. You’ll divorce me.’
‘Makes a change from you divorcing me.’
‘It’s a really tricky situation, you know? I mean, you don’t want to be rude.’ She laughs again, hearing herself. ‘I mean, like, impolite.’
‘What on earth had you said to him?’
‘Oh, God, I don’t know. I suppose I had flirted with him in our emails. I just wanted to get back at you for being—’
‘A fucking fucker. Yes, I remember.’
‘But I never said anything about sex. I mean, you don’t, do you? You don’t say in an email, Get ready so we can do it the minute I walk in the door.’
‘Knickers off ready when I come home.’
‘What?’
‘It spells Norwich. You were supposed to put it on the back of the envelope when writing to your girlfriend.’
‘Norwich?’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says. ‘Go on. What did you do?’
‘It’s all right for you,’ she says. ‘You’re a man. You can always blame Matey. But if you’re a woman you can go ahead even if you don’t want to. It happens all the time, actually.’
He’s looking at her with such a sweet smile.
‘So you went ahead.’
‘Oh, Tom.’ She feels terrible. ‘I couldn’t work out how not to. It just seemed so – well, so impolite.’