David looked down. His hair was still stuck to his forehead. He looked like a child who’d suffered a football game in the rain and just wanted to go home.
‘Moving here … everything changes, you know?’ He turned and looked at Annie. He raised his hand once again and massaged his neck. ‘I was settled … at least I thought I was settled, and then I decided to change everything … don’t know why I decided that –’
David smiled, and then the nervous laugh once more – a short, dry sound.
‘S’pose I was looking for something … or running away from something?’ he said, and the question was directed at no-one but himself.
‘So you have no-one to talk to?’ Annie asked, and again she took another step or two forward. She felt emboldened, as if here she was in her own territory and someone had come seeking help.
‘Sounds pathetic, right?’
Annie shook her head. ‘Not at all. Life is people. Starts and ends and there’s nothing but people in between. You don’t do this stuff alone.’
‘You seem to manage,’ he said.
‘You don’t know anything about me,’ Annie said, but there was nothing defensive in her tone. ‘I could be out living the life and partying ’till three every morning.’
‘You could,’ David said, ‘but somehow I don’t think so.’
She smiled. ‘You want some coffee?’
‘Could kill for coffee,’ he said.
‘Then washing cups wouldn’t be too much to ask?’
He smiled. It was a warm smile, a human smile, and there was something altogether right about the moment.
‘Come,’ she said, and turned towards the kitchen at the back.
David Quinn nodded, followed her, removing his coat as he walked.
For the best part of two hours they talked. There were no customers, and only when Annie went out to fetch sandwiches from the deli across the block did she realize that the store sign had not been turned. Another first. A very first.
They talked of his life, how his family had once been scattered like buckshot across New York, into Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, but then soon after his tenth birthday he had been orphaned. A house fire. Fast, brutal. He had lost his parents and a younger brother. There were two older brothers, one he hadn’t seen since 1992, another since 1989. He’d lost his mother and father simultaneously. Left for school, spent a handful of hours learning the names of the presidents and the chemical formulas for water and salt, and then returned home to find his life had changed irrevocably. After that, what was left of the family had drifted apart, gone their separate ways, as if to meet again would merely serve to open wounds that they knew could never heal. He had lived with an aunt until he reached his teens and then he’d walked away. Walked away from the past and never looked back. He spoke without anger, without any apparent emotion at all, and Annie could tell how deeply such a thing must have been buried for him to speak of it so bluntly. Her heart went out to him. There was something that connected them in some small way, and for this – despite its brutality – she was grateful. And Annie told him of her life, a small life though it seemed; the death of her parents, the ever-decreasing concentric circle of her existence.
‘What did you want?’ he asked her.
‘What did I want?’
‘As a kid, growing up you know? What did you dream about?’
She laughed briefly. ‘You mean like running away to the circus or something?’
‘Whatever,’ David said.
She was quiet for some time, pensive, casting her mind backward through events and people, names and faces and places, in some moments the edges blending together, seamless and without divide.
‘I wanted to write,’ she said eventually. ‘I seem to remember wanting to write … the great American novel or something.’
She looked up from her thoughts, and found David watching her. He wasn’t looking at her, he was watching her. She felt momentarily unnerved, a little disturbed perhaps. There was an intensity, a passion in his eyes, that she found disconcerting.
‘What?’ she asked, suddenly self-conscious.
He shook his head and smiled. ‘Nothing.’
‘What?’ she repeated.
He seemed awkward, off-balance. ‘It’s … it’s just that –’
‘Just what?’
‘You really are quite extraordinarily beautiful Annie O’Neill.’
She was lost for words. How did you respond to such a comment? She couldn’t ever remember anyone saying such a thing. She waved her hand in a nonchalant and dismissive fashion.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘A little Madeline Stowe, a little Winona Ryder –’
‘Enough,’ Annie said, her voice sharp, unforgiving. She didn’t wish to be complimented, for such things seemed unnecessary and inappropriate.
‘I’m sorry if I –’
Annie cut him off with another wave of the hand. ‘Forget about it,’ she said, and though she knew she would not, and neither would he, there was something that was now out there. He had crossed the line, turned what could have been an honest and meaningful friendship into something that implied sex and carnality and physical desire. Why did men always have to do that? Why couldn’t they just let something be what it was without introducing something awkward and ungainly into the proceedings? Hormones? Necessity?
Annie turned towards the window. She wished he was outside, she wished it was the first moment she’d met him. She wished whatever she’d said or done to make him feel she was approachable could be turned back and folded within itself, packed away neatly with all the other could-have-beens and might-have-dones that seemed to populate her life with such familiarity.
‘I’ve upset you,’ he said, ‘made you feel awkward … I’m sorry.’
She shook her head, and then she thought better of it. So easy to dismiss it all, to cast it aside. Who was it who’d said that all the problems you didn’t face were finally the ones that buried you?
‘Why?’ she asked, aware of the tone of her voice, the emotion she was feeling. It was a new feeling, something closer to anger than irritation. ‘Why d’you have to say something like that? Here we were, getting along fine, just talking … whatever –’
‘I didn’t mean –’
‘Didn’t mean what? Didn’t mean to make me feel embarrassed? Well David Quinn, you did make me feel embarrassed … as simple as that. How come men have to throw things into the arena that really have no place there?’
He frowned, seemed dismayed. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What are you so afraid of?’
Now she was angry. How dare he! ‘Afraid? You have the nerve to ask me what I’m afraid of?’ she snapped.
‘I just said you were beautiful … did no-one ever tell you how beautiful you were before?’
She looked at him, looked right at him, and in that moment there was such honesty, such a genuine question in his eyes, that her anger seemed to collapse within itself and disappear. It left as quickly and unexpectedly as it had come. She shook her head. ‘I don’t think anyone …’ She paused, her words lost in some indefinable territory around her heart.
David reached out and touched her hand.
She instinctively withdrew.
He left his hand right where it was, palm upwards now until, with some trepidation, she lowered her hand once more and rested it on his. His fingers enclosed hers; she felt the warmth of his skin.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you or made you feel awkward or embarrassed …’
‘It’s okay,’ she heard herself say, her voice sounding as if it came not from her but from some other place in the room. It was almost as if she were watching herself. The angles and corners she’d felt were softening, merging a little, and she believed that if she’d been able to step outside herself she would have looked back and seen someone vague and blurred at the edges.
‘We go backwards,’ he said. ‘Rewind half an hour or so and start
again, okay?’
She nodded in the affirmative, but knew that what had been said was still out there. He’d said she was beautiful, sounded as if he’d meant it, and there was something about such a thing that would never, ever be forgotten. How could such a thing ever lose its sense of moment?
‘We were talking about your family,’ he said, ‘and then we were talking about the great American novel you were going to write.’
She smiled as the memory returned.
‘How old were you?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘Twelve, thirteen, I don’t remember exactly.’
‘And why did you want to write?’
‘I think I wanted to make people feel things … make people feel emotions that were new, have thoughts they hadn’t had before, something like that.’
He nodded, understanding reflected in his eyes. ‘What’s the most important book you’ve ever read?’
She smiled. ‘The most important book I’ve ever read? How is it possible to answer a question like that?’ she said, and then it came to her, came to her so easily, and she started to smile wider, her face relaxing, her tension easing so comfortably.
‘Which one?’ he prompted.
‘A book called Breathing Space,’ she said. ‘My father left it for me … one of the few things he left for me.’ She touched the face of the watch on her wrist, and in that moment she recalled an image of her father, vague and indistinct, standing there in the hallway of their house. It had been raining then also. She could remember the sound of the water hitting the deck beyond the kitchen, and there was a smell in the air like cinnamon, and something else unidentifiable. He was leaving, always leaving it seemed. She couldn’t have been more than five years old, perhaps six, and had she known then that he would be alive for no more than a year or two she would have rushed towards him, thrown her arms around him, told him she loved him, that she didn’t want him to leave again. She tried to concentrate on the image, tried to focus, but there was nothing more than a feeling.
There was a tightness in her chest, her throat felt constricted, and when she blinked there was moisture around her eyes.
David squeezed her hand, and only then did she become aware that he had never let go. A lifeline. Tenuous, fragile, but nevertheless a lifeline. To what she didn’t know, and in that moment it didn’t matter. She was not alone. That was the main thing, and she appreciated it.
‘You okay?’ he asked, his voice sympathetic, gentle.
‘Fine,’ she said, but there was a reserve in her tone that said she wasn’t so fine at all.
‘What did he do?’ David asked.
‘Do?’
‘Your father … what did he do?’
Annie didn’t speak for some time. She tried to recall something, anything. She tried to picture him leaving with a bag, a holdall perhaps, some kind of uniform? She could remember nothing at all.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I honestly don’t know what he did.’ Her voice conveyed her uncertainty and confusion. She found it hard to believe that this thought had never really crossed her mind before.
‘And your mother never told you?’ David inquired.
Annie shook her head.
‘You never asked?’
Annie was still for a while. ‘I must have done,’ she said quietly. ‘I must have asked her … and she must have told me.’
There was a silence between them, as if here in this moment some deep secret had been unearthed, something that even as she considered it brought a sense of potential alarm. How could she arrive at thirty years of age and not have the faintest clue as to her own father’s profession?
‘Perhaps he was a spy,’ David said, and he smiled, and the tension was broken.
‘Perhaps,’ she replied, and tried to engage in the levity he was attempting. It worked, just a little, but nevertheless that aura of mystery prevailed.
‘The mysterious Mister O’Neill,’ David said.
She was elsewhere for a moment, and then she looked up and saw David once again massaging the back of his neck. It seemed like a nervous habit now, something he couldn’t control.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘Sure … why d’you ask?’
‘Your neck,’ she said. ‘You keep rubbing the back of your neck.’
‘It aches sometimes,’ he said. ‘Just a little.’
Annie glanced at her watch. It was gone two o’clock. There had been no customers, not one, despite turning the sign when she’d left for sandwiches. Perhaps the rain kept them away. Perhaps the unspoken thought that at such a time as this she didn’t wish to be disturbed. Sullivan would have said the latter.
‘You don’t have to go to work?’ she asked.
‘No,’ David said. ‘I’m on leave. Work is so unpredictable, and sometimes we’re away weeks at a time. They like to give us breathing space every once in a while.’
Breathing space, she thought, but didn’t say a thing. The atmosphere had changed, and Annie felt that she’d walked along the edges of something deceptively simple, and yet somehow profoundly complex. Later, thinking back, her single most enduring thought, resonating like a bell in the cool crisp air of a still Sunday morning, was that she did not know a thing – not one thing – about her father. Such a simple question – What did your father do? – and she had been lost in a host of half-formed imaginings that had no connection to reality.
And then David said, ‘I should go,’ and rose from the chair. A while back he had released her hand and she hadn’t even noticed. The lifeline was disappearing.
‘Are you busy later?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘I have someone coming to see me,’ she said.
‘A date?’ he asked, but there was nothing suggestive in his tone.
‘No,’ she said, and smiled. ‘No such thing. Tonight I have my reading club.’
‘A reading club?’
‘Yes, a reading club, first meeting tonight.’
‘And anyone can come?’
‘No, not anyone … a very select group of initiates, only the very best people – you know?’
David nodded, seemed distracted. ‘Then another time,’ he said.
‘Yes … another time. You know where I am.’
‘I do,’ he said, ‘and I’m sorry about what I said.’
Annie smiled. ‘I’m not … not anymore.’
He seemed to relax a little. ‘So another time it is then?’
Annie hesitated for a second. ‘Yes, another time.’
David smiled, seemed pleased. ‘I’ll see you then,’ he said, and started towards the door.
She went after him, slowly at first, and even as he reached the sidewalk she was there at the window watching his back as he walked away. He didn’t turn, and for some reason she was glad of that. She wouldn’t have wanted to appear desperate or lonely – or hopeful. Hope was an over-rated commodity, too over-rated by far.
She thought of the possibility that something might happen here, and for a moment she was caught in a brief question-and-answer with herself.
Should I? Perhaps, perhaps not.
Could I? I think I could.
Will I? I … I hope …
And then there was Sullivan’s voice: Coincidence my dear, is bullshit … Your thoughts are almost exclusively responsible for the situations you get yourself into.
David Quinn disappeared at the end of the block, and Annie turned to survey the store. For the first time the walls seemed to be closing in upon her: the place seemed so small; so many shadows, so little space.
She shook her head and went to the counter, and there on the surface sat the sheaf of papers that Forrester had left with her five days before. She reached for the telephone and called Jack Sullivan, shared the time of day with him and then reminded him to come down at six before Forrester arrived. He said he would, promised he wouldn’t drink too much and forget, and she hung up the receiver.
The store was filled to bursting with silence. The rain had st
opped and, but for the sound of her own gentle breathing, there was nothing. Nothing at all.
SEVEN
Forrester arrived punctually. Sullivan was already in the kitchen, out of sight. He wasn’t drunk, he hadn’t forgotten, and if anything he’d been early. Annie was grateful for that, more grateful than he could tell from the nonchalance of her greeting when he appeared at the front door.
‘Good day?’ he’d asked.
‘Quiet,’ she’d said, deciding before he’d even arrived to say nothing of David Quinn. Irrespective of whatever doubts she herself may have had about David, Annie O’Neill was considerate enough to take Sullivan’s feelings into account. Though there could never be any possibility of a relationship between herself and Sullivan she knew that he held her close in his thoughts. His feelings were avuncular, paternal almost, and if she started to change her patterns too rapidly he would become concerned. His presence at the store before Forrester arrived, the fact that he had made it at all, said all that needed to be said about how much he cared for her welfare.
‘So the mystery man arrives at seven,’ Sullivan had commented as he passed the counter and made for the kitchen. ‘I’ll be back here, out of sight, and then if there’s any trouble I can leap out and wrestle him to the ground.’
Annie had smiled. ‘The guy must be seventy Jack … I really don’t think there’s gonna be any trouble.’
‘Charlie Chaplin fathered his last child when he was eighty-two … even when we’re on our deathbeds we’re still up for that.’
Annie had waved him away, and though she honestly believed that Forrester presented no threat at all, she nevertheless felt a sense of security in the fact that Sullivan would be on hand to help her.
And then Robert Forrester arrived, the same topcoat, a similar bundle beneath his arm, and though he merely smiled and nodded towards her as he came in, Annie felt a slight feeling of disquiet invade her thoughts.
Did she dream something? Something about herself and Sullivan and a child? She couldn’t remember, but seeing the old man standing there, his character-scarred face, his white hair, she felt the images of the things she’d read come flooding back. The horror of Dachau, the brutal murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings in some desolate and godforsaken place …