Not a pleasant thought.
He set off down the frosty path, raising his hand to wave to her as he reached the gate, feeling the withdrawal of warmth and light as a minor but real abandonment.
Eight
The phone was ringing as he opened the front door of the cottage, and he ran into the living room to pick it up. As soon as he heard Nerys’s voice, he caught the brown fug of his breath rising from a suddenly bilious stomach. Nerys sounded controlled and strident, spoiling for a row. She’d had an offer for the house, she said, and she thought they ought to accept it. The papers were full of a slowing down in the housing market, well, they’d been talking about that off and on for months, hadn’t they, but this time people did seem to think it was actually going to happen, so –
By ‘people’ he suspected she meant Roger. Roger-the-lodger, the sod. ‘How much?’
‘One and a half million. The estate agent says they’ve got the money. What do you think?’
‘Grab it.’
‘That’s what I thought. Well,’ she said breathlessly, ‘I’ll go ahead, then, shall I?’
‘Yes. And thanks, Nerys. I know you’ve had all the work.’
‘That’s all right.’ She managed to sound gracious and aggrieved at the same time. ‘Are you well?’
‘Yes, fine. And you?’
‘Fine.’
Somehow in a plethora of ‘fines’ they managed to get off the phone. It must be over, he thought, replacing the receiver, if they’d reverted to being polite.
He’d hardly put the receiver down, when the phone rang again. He jumped to answer it, superstitiously afraid it might be Nerys ringing to say the sale had fallen through, though if so it must’ve been the shortest negotiation in history – but it was Beth, sounding resentful, as she always did when asking a favour. She gave generously – she was always dashing about doing some good work or other, letting this, that or the other cause eat into her scanty free time – but she’d never learnt to ask or receive gracefully, so it was a slightly petulant-sounding Beth who explained that Justine’s car wouldn’t start, and she couldn’t stay over because it was her father’s birthday, and they were going out for supper, so could he possibly run her home? Beth would have done it herself, of course, but Adam was in the bath and couldn’t be left. Stephen cut her short, saying it was no bother at all and He’d be up to the house in a couple of minutes.
Fortunately, he hadn’t started drinking. One of his health ploys was to put it off till later and later in the evening.
Justine was waiting at the gate, Beth just visible at the crack in the front door. ‘Goodnight,’ they called to each other. ‘Have a nice evening,’ Beth added.
Stephen waved, but didn’t get out of the car.
As Justine settled into the passenger seat and pulled the seat belt across, he said, ‘I don’t know where you live.’
‘Hetton-on-the-Moor.’
‘No wiser.’
‘It’s the other side of the forest. Don’t worry, I’ll direct you.’
‘Is it far?’ He was wondering about the petrol.
‘Six miles.’
Not far, then, though distances were deceptive here. The country lanes wound round so much that estimated travelling times were apt to be too optimistic. And then there was the forest, with its single road, its mile after mile of impenetrable trees.
‘Is it anywhere near Woodland House?’
‘Kate Frobisher’s place? Yes, she lives a couple of miles outside the village.’
‘One of your father’s parishioners.’
‘Yeah, but not the God-bothering kind.’
A short pause, as the car bumped off the grass verge, its headlights illuminating hedgerows laced with frost.
‘Why, do you know her?’
‘I’ve met her once or twice. I knew Ben well. I did quite a few assignments with him.’
‘Bosnia.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ He was surprised she knew. It must be history to her.
‘I read the book. Left here.’
He took the corner, his headlights revealing the dark mass of the forest straight ahead. ‘That was the last book we did together.’
She mumbled something about it being very tragic. He agreed that it was. After that they drove for a while in silence, and the soft sound of the tyres over slushy snow seemed to seal him off from normal life. There hadn’t been time for the news about the house to sink in, but he was beginning to realize he was free. Single. He didn’t know whether he felt elated or frightened, but elation was closer. He felt he was setting off for a day out, instead of just driving Beth’s au pair home.
‘You scored a real bull’s eye with those owl pellets.’
‘Yes, he liked them, didn’t he? And you don’t have to boil them to get the skulls.’
‘That’s right.’ She laughed. ‘We’re going to label them tomorrow so that’ll keep him busy. And then we’re going to do a proper survey: how many mice? How many shrews? What’s the percentage of each animal in the owl’s diet…? I don’t suppose you could show me the tree, could you? Because we’re going to need a lot more pellets.’
‘Of course, come over any time. It sounds like an awful lot of work.’
‘I don’t mind. I’ll miss him, if I do go on this course.’
‘I wouldn’t’ve thought he was all that easy to take care of. He’s –’ He pulled himself up, sharply.
‘Weird. Yes, I know, but I don’t think There’s all that much wrong with him. Beth was frantic when they diagnosed Asperger’s.’
He mustn’t let her see that he hadn’t known. ‘I’ve never really understood what that is.’
‘It’s basically a sort of difficulty in seeing other people as people. Like if you were looking at this’ – she pointed to the trees his headlights were revealing – ‘there wouldn’t be any essential difference between me and the trees. So you can’t change your perspective and see the situation from another person’s point of view, because you can’t grasp the fact that they have their own internal life, and they might be thinking something different from you.’
‘So they’re objects?’
‘Yes.’
Stephen thought for a moment, trying to relate this to his knowledge of Adam. He didn’t know him well enough. ‘I don’t know how much good these labels do. I was supposed to go and see a psychiatrist – the newspaper I worked for wanted somebody to have a look at me.’
‘What was wrong?’
‘I was starting to howl at every full moon.’
‘No, really what was wrong?’
‘Nightmares. The usual. If you want the label – post-traumatic stress disorder. I don’t know. I decided in the end it just wasn’t for me. After all, nobody forced me to go to those places. Some of them I actually begged to go to – it was my idea. And if you bring it on yourself, like that, I don’t think you’ve got any right to complain. You’ve certainly no right to expect sympathy.’
‘You sound as if you think you don’t deserve help.’
‘I don’t think it’s possible. I think you have to do it yourself. Especially if you got yourself into the mess in the first place.’ This was the wrong conversation to be having with her – too intimate, too intense – but he didn’t know how to get out of it. ‘There was a guy once – a Holocaust survivor – who said something about seeing the sun rise in Auschwitz and it was black. But you see he didn’t choose that experience. He got lumbered with it. Whereas people like me who go round the world poking their noses into other people’s wars – we do choose it.’
‘A black sun?’
‘Yes. We risk the possibility. And if you end up with nightmares, too bad. they’re part of the baggage. And you certainly shouldn’t go running to a therapist, and say, “Poor little me.”’
They drove for a while in silence.
‘I shouldn’t say anything,’ she said at last, ‘because I don’t know enough about it, but I do think you’ve got therapy completely wrong. I don’t think
it’s about feeling sorry for yourself, or even the therapist feeling sorry for you. I think it’s supposed to be a lot tougher than that.’
He was surprised by her vehemence and let the subject drop. After a few minutes he asked, ‘So what are you going to do after university?’
‘Don’t know really. Something with children.’
‘Teaching?’
‘No, I thought of being a paediatrician. Or a child psychiatrist, but it’s years ahead. I don’t really know.’
‘Oh, so you’re reading Medicine?’
‘Yes.’ She was stifling a yawn as she spoke. ‘Right here and then just follow the road.’
‘You sound tired.’
‘It’s the warmth. I’ll be all right.’
The next time he looked she was asleep, hanging from her seat belt like a toddler, her full lips pouting slightly on every exhaled breath. He smiled to himself and tried to drive smoothly, taking his time on the bends, braking well in advance.
The next bend was sharper. He reached out to steady her and felt her body heat on the palm of his hand, like a burn that lingered for many minutes after he touched her. She slipped sideways until her knee rested against his thigh. He was intensely aware of her warmth. He didn’t want the drive to end. For as long as she went on sleeping, she was potentially his. As soon as she woke up, He’d be back with the implacable reality: that she was his sister-in-law’s au pair and more than twenty years younger than him.
On the next stretch of straight road he risked looking down at her. Her face was in shadow. He could see only her hands, which were loosely knotted in her lap. There was a dusting of gold hairs on her wrists, each hair distinct in the faint glow of light from the dashboard. He thought how smooth and firm her skin looked, how pleasant it would be to touch, then dragged his gaze back to the road.
Too late. The road was momentarily streaked with red. He thought he heard a thud, but it was lost immediately in the squeal of brakes. The car began to skid, but he righted it, though not before He’d glimpsed the slope between the trees, leading down to the stream in the valley far below. He brought the car to a jarring halt.
Justine was awake, staring. ‘What was it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did we hit it?’
‘I don’t know. Stay here.’ She started undoing her seat belt. ‘No, stay here.’
He got out of the car, his stomach churning. Burnt rubber mixed with the smells of new bracken and moist earth. He inspected the ground round his wheels, his fingertips flinching in anticipation of what they might find. No sound now, except for the occasional slither and plop as an overburdened branch let fall its weight of snow. Whatever it was must be dead – that was all right, he could cope with death. What he dreaded was injury – the need to put whatever it was out of its misery. His fingers dabbled in wetness, but when he brought them close to the headlights they were merely smeared with mud. He stood up, scanning the ground, peering under the wheels, looking up and down the road.
‘Can you see anything?’
‘No, I think it must be further back. We must have gone right over it.’
‘I expect it was a rabbit. There’s lots of them about at the moment.’
He’d seen them too, baby rabbits newly out of the burrow bumping along the grass verges without fear, or caught in the middle of the road, quivering bags of blood with the headlights in their eyes. But he didn’t think this was a rabbit. He remembered that streak of red.
‘There’s a torch in the glove compartment. Can you find it?’
He heard her hand poking about in the recesses, and then she got out into the road to hand it to him. They walked back up the lane together. The forest stretched out in all directions, full of furtive rustlings that froze as they passed, noses twitched at the air, unseen eyes followed them. A few flakes of snow, fat, splothery, loose flakes that wouldn’t lie, drifted down into the wavering circle of torchlight.
‘Do you know, I’m beginning to think we might have missed it?’
Stephen kept his voice casual, but inside he wanted to sing. He didn’t want this drive to end in death.
He followed Justine with the torch as she climbed up the right bank and stood brightly illuminated against the dark wood. As she turned to face him, he lowered the torch to avoid dazzling her. ‘What do you think it was?’ she asked.
‘I thought it might be a fox.’
‘Could be. I heard one barking last night. They’ll have started mating. It woke me up.’
He wanted to get back home, to draw the curtains against the darkness with its indistinguishable screams of lust and pain. ‘There’s no sign of it. I think we’d better leave it.’
‘I’ll just have a look in here. There’s a little path, can you see?’
Before Stephen could say anything, she’d ducked under the barbed-wire fence and disappeared into the darkness of the wood.
He stood in the lane, while all around him the snow fell faster, spiralling down into the light of the headlights, though when they reached the wet road the flakes disappeared. Blinded at first, he slowly became accustomed to the dark. He didn’t want to go too far away from the car, which wasn’t parked particularly safely because the grass verge wasn’t wide enough. He waited, walked up and down, stamped his feet. The full moon clung to the crest of a pine tree high above his head. Once or twice he called her name, but the sound echoed eerily up and down the green tunnel of the lane, stirring the darkness with its echoes. In the end it seemed simpler, safer even, to wait in silence. He didn’t want to attract attention to himself. The thick darkness of nights in Africa came back to him, pressure building behind the thin membrane of everyday life like matter in a boil. ‘Justine,’ he called again.
When she didn’t answer, he climbed up the bank to look for her. Here on the edge of the wood there were clumps of cow parsley almost as tall as he was. Dry, brown stalks that creaked a little as he brushed them aside. He waited on this side of the fence, in darkness because the torch battery seemed to be dying. At last a rattling of feet through dead leaves told him she was returning. He switched the torch back on and his heart turned over, for there, walking along the path between the trees, was a white-faced creature with glowing eyes.
As she came closer, he saw she looked nervous. Perhaps it was his silence, perhaps the deadness of the woods beyond. She was breathing quickly.
‘Nothing?’ he asked.
‘No, nothing.’
Their whispering restored normality of a sort. He turned and began scrambling down the slope towards the car, his feet catching in the ferns. Then he heard her gasp. He looked round to see her doubled up, halfway through the barbed-wire fence, her jacket caught on one of the barbs.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should’ve…’
He went back and in silence began working to free her. It took a long time because he didn’t want to tear the cloth, and by the end he was breathing rapidly and his fingers had become clumsy. He caught his hand on one of the barbs, and was glad of the stinging because it made him think of something other than her nearness. She was grinning, embarrassed by the situation, as aware of him as he was of her. Finally he straightened up and asked, ‘Are you all right? Did you hurt yourself?’
She lifted the weight of hair, and there, on the side of her neck, slanting down into the sweater, was a long red line, beaded with drops of blood that in this light looked black.
‘That looks nasty.’
He was hardly aware of the words. He could only stare and stare at the red tear in the white skin. He wanted to put his hand over it. He wanted to touch it with his fingertips. It was as if his mind had been torn, a rent made in the fabric of his daily self and through this rent, slowly, all previous inhibitions and restraint dissolved into the night air. He reached out for her and kissed her. After the first shock, she started to kiss him back. He was dazed by the speed of it. His hands came up to hold her head. Her hair felt so alive, as if his exploring fingers might strike sparks, and do
wn there at the roots were the marvellously interlocking bones of her skull. His mind went numb. There was no past, no future, only their two bodies pressing against each other in the darkness at the edge of the wood.
They stepped back at last, looking into each other’s faces. Not the intimate lovers’ gaze of both eyes into one pupil, but the scanning of people who are still strangers.
‘Well,’ he said, trying to sound casual, and not succeeding. He hadn’t enough breath left to support the tone of voice he wanted.
She stared up at him, doubtful, as wary now as he was himself.
He swallowed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘that wasn’t meant to happen.’ What a ludicrous thing to say. He’d blurted it out without thinking, and immediately asked himself, why the hell not? Consenting adults, both single. She’d returned the kiss. The silence became a problem. He tried again. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you home.’
She turned and strode off down the bank, looking neither to right nor left. He followed her more slowly, flashing the torch well ahead of him so it would light her way.
He’d almost reached the car when he saw it: a red mess of spiky fur and splintered bone. As he got into the car and started the engine, he was grateful she hadn’t seen it. Against all reason, that thought still had power to console.
Nine
There was silence in the car. They stared straight ahead as, more slowly and carefully now, he drove along, his headlights probing the darkness between the trees. He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t apologize again, and anyway she hadn’t objected. It was just that He’d precipitated a situation he didn’t want and was trying, clumsily, to claw his way back. He could hardly repeat that he hadn’t meant it, and so he said nothing, trying to convey by silence that the incident had been trivial, but silence didn’t seem able to carry that message. With every minute the kiss seemed to acquire greater importance. They were both taking quick shallow breaths, as if afraid the other would hear deeper breathing and misinterpret it. His chest felt tight. He was aware of her thighs, slightly apart, of the way the seat belt separated her breasts.