Aoife flips a page over, realises that she hates this photog-rapher’s work, that she met the man once and he was an arrogant pig. She eyes the long form of her brother. ‘You OK?’ she says.
‘Mmmnnng,’ Michael Francis says, or thereabouts.
His face is pressed to the rag rug in what was once his sisters’ bedroom. It is, he suddenly sees, the best place in the world to be. The floorboards warm under his torso, his legs resting gently apart, his eyes closed, his cheek against the interesting terrain of the knotted fabric. Didn’t Monica and his mother make this rug one winter? A flash memory of the kitchen table covered with shreds of fabric, his mother reaching across it, breaks the surface of his mind but then blurs and disappears. Maybe it happened; maybe it didn’t.
‘Do you think I can lie here for ever?’ he says, his voice pleasantly muffled by the rug.
He hears his sister turn a page in her book – the thin rattle of paper, then her hands smoothing the surface. ‘You could,’ she says, in her don’t-you-dare-disturb-my-reading voice, ‘theoretically. But you’d die of dehydration in a day or two. Maybe less in this heat.’
He moves up a hand to cover his eyes. He can hear someone – Monica? – moving about in the room below. A car grinds past outside. Aoife turns a page, then another. Someone, downstairs, clatters the teapot against the side of the sink.
‘I did something,’ he says.
His eyes are still shut and Aoife is behind him but he is aware of her raising her head. She puts her book aside, on the bed next to her, as he knew she would. He hears the springs of the bed complain at this shift in weight.
‘Is this to do with Dad?’
‘No.’
‘OK. A good something or a bad something?’
‘Bad.’
There is a pause. Someone in a garden a few doors down is calling out a long imperative about a sun-lounger, a hat, and something else he can’t make out.
‘A job something? A marriage something?’
‘Marriage.’
‘Ah.’
It is a sound so full of wisdom, so empty of judgement that he cannot help but tell her everything – or as close to everything as he can manage. He cannot, for example, tell her that the first time he saw Gina Mayhew it was as if he recognised her, as if he’d been waiting for her to come. There you are, he almost said, what kept you? Or that he had never believed in the concept of love at first sight. Or that she wasn’t what you might think of as attractive, or his type, or someone who might derail a marriage or the thoughts of the head of history, husband, father, family man. She was tall, with limbs that she didn’t seem entirely in control of and white, freckled skin. She reminded him most of a giraffe. Her sleeves stopped short of her wrist-bones. Her feet were big, long and thin, and she shod them in the kind of buckled sandals a child might wear. She wore divided skirts, cardigans that looked as though she’d knitted them herself, an Alice band that held back her bluntly cut hair. The kind of outfits that he knew would draw unkindness from her pupils. He couldn’t tell Aoife that the first time he’d gone to find her in her science lab – on some pretext or other, because really he’d just wanted to see her on her own, he’d wanted to look at her, that was all, away from the smoke-hung boredom of the staffroom – he’d found her wearing a lab coat too short for her, stepping out from behind a blackboard on which was displayed the carbon cycle. On seeing him, she blushed and his thought was: The blush cycle. He almost said this out loud. Blood flooding the surface of her face and neck, and his too, as if in answer.
Instead, he tells Aoife the bare bones of the story. That he fell for a colleague and she fell for him. That they ate lunch together behind the fume cupboard. That they sometimes took the tube together in the evening, as far as Tottenham Court Road, where she switched lines. That Claire had found out. That Gina had returned to Australia. That, as revenge, Claire is doing an Open University degree and attends lectures and tutorials and fills up their house with new friends.
He doesn’t tell his sister that he sometimes goes and stands beside the fume cupboard, even now, a year and a half on. Or that he once took the lab coat that was hanging by a peg and weighed it in his hand. Or that the sight of another teacher casually using the Ayers Rock mug she’d left behind so enraged him that he removed it from the staffroom. It still sits in his desk drawer. He doesn’t tell her these things because he doesn’t want her to know; he doesn’t tell her because he knows that Aoife is able to fill in such details for herself.
When he stops talking, it feels as though he’s been speaking for an age, that it’s impossible to remember a time when he wasn’t moving his mouth and producing sounds. Behind him, Aoife is smoking and it occurs to him that this might bring Gretta vengefully up the stairs: she has not allowed smoking in the house ever since she herself gave up.
He listens to his sister suck on a cigarette; he watches smoke drift into the room. He clears his throat. ‘Say something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Anything.’
‘OK. What happened when Claire found out?’
‘It was . . .’ he turns his face into the tufts of the rag rug, breathes in the silt of it, the microscopic layers of dust and debris from his sisters’ early lives; he is imagining wisps of baby hair, lint from childhood jumpers, particles of teenage skin, nail clippings, cuticle shreds, the peeled-away bits of split ends ‘. . . awful. Just awful. The worst thing ever.’
If it hadn’t been for the school trip, everything would have been all right. He would have been able to keep things under control, keep his life ticking over. But a few days before the annual A-level visit to the trenches of the Somme, the head had called him into his office.
The teacher who usually accompanied the trip – a chain-smoking, elderly woman who’d taught geography apparently since the glaciers withdrew from Britain – had had to go into hospital for ‘tests’. Here the head blustered and fiddled with a paperweight so Michael guessed it was probably some gynaecological issue, something that involved bleeding and probing and surgery in unthinkable places. But all was well, the head had assured him, because he had had the bright idea of asking that new biology teacher to accompany him on the trip. Probably never even seen France, the head said, be good for her. Aussies liked to travel, didn’t they?
They took the ferry. Only three of the pupils were sick, which was an improvement on last year. On the bus, he and Gina Mayhew sat separately. She had her head turned to look out of the window the entire way. She kept her bag – a shiny red leather box with a looping strap – perched on her knee, like a small dog. They were, he thought, courteous with each other and no more. ‘Scrupulous’ was the word. They were scrupulous with and around each other. They made minimum eye contact; they spoke to each other only when necessary and only in front of the children; she addressed him as Mr Riordan; she checked on the girls at lights-out time and he checked on the boys. Nobody would know anything was amiss.
It was, he saw after the first day, going to be fine. They were professional, they were a team, they were two teachers supervising a school trip. Nothing more. Whatever this was, it was nothing. Everything was going to be OK.
They saw the trenches; they saw the fields, they walked through the graveyards, and he had to send only one child back to the minibus. He distributed worksheets; he handed out pencils; he gave a talk (brief) about trench warfare; he pointed out the gradient, how the Germans were on higher ground; he showed them a stretch of ground on which fifty-seven thousand men fell in one day.
‘Write that down,’ he said, ‘fifty-seven thousand men, most of them—’
‘Not much older than you,’ Gina burst out.
He looked down from his vantage-point of a reconstructed ladder leading into no man’s land. Gina sat at the end of the line, a yellow cagoule over a pair of shorts with lions embroidered around the hem, her hair in a swinging ponytail. She had a pair of birdwatching binoculars around her neck. He hadn’t realised that she was even listening. He’d assumed s
he was there in body but that her mind was wandering over – what? He imagined the deserts of Australia, stained red in the sun, the byways and paths of the human circulatory system, those diagrams of worms mating, sewing patterns for divided skirts. Who knew where she went inside her head while he was giving the same old spiel about conscription and bully beef that he’d been giving for the past ten years?
As their gazes locked, she blushed. That same bright stain travelling up her neck, into her cheeks. He forced himself to look away, to look back to his notes, to find where he was in his lesson.
‘Mmm,’ he said, playing for time. ‘Now. Weaponry. Who can tell me about that?’
That night, he was several fathoms deep in sleep when it came to him that someone was knocking on the door of his single-bunked room at the youth hostel. He stumbled from the bed and opened the door and there was Gina Mayhew, in a pair of flowered cotton pyjamas, short, her bare legs gleaming in the strip lighting.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Gina, I don’t think—’
But she was off down the corridor. ‘You’d better come,’ she said, over her shoulder.
The pupils had, perhaps inevitably, got hold of some alcohol and there had been a party in the girls’ room. He and Gina stood in the doorway and he took a quick inventory. Five were drunk, one seriously, four were semi-naked, two were in a clinch, three were vomiting or looked as though they were about to. For the next half-hour, he and Gina worked steadily, upbraiding, cleaning, separating, segregating, confiscating. Gina dressed the girls – he carefully averted his eyes from this – and got them into bed. He marshalled the boys back to their dormitory and shut the door. Then he went back.
Gina was standing in the corridor, her arms full of confiscated bottles of vodka.
‘All fine?’ he said, keeping his sightlines vague and above all shifting: the walls, the floor, the door handles. He did not need another view of those shortie pyjamas, those pale, freckled legs.
‘Yeah,’ she whispered. ‘They’re all in bed.’
‘Great. Well,’ he lifted his arms and dropped them back to his sides a couple of times, as if embarking on a doomed attempt at flight, ‘I guess we should—’
‘Do you ever . . .’ she began, tilting her head back, as if studying the ceiling.
He looked at her, and it struck him in this moment that he hardly ever looked at her. He couldn’t. If he did, he lost track of how long it was appropriate to look at a woman. Better not to risk it at all. He saw the long, stretched tendons of her neck, the vertical groove above her lip, the pale russet of her lashes.
‘. . . think that you’re in the wrong job?’
All the time, he wanted to say, every minute of every day. I should be taking seminars at Berkeley, at Williams, at NYU, not mopping up after drunk teenagers in a French youth hostel.
‘Is that what you think?’ he said instead. ‘Don’t. You mustn’t. I’ve seen you with the kids. You’re great. You’re more than great.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are. You’ll be fine, you’ll see. The first year is always the hardest. After that, it becomes second nature.’ He put up his hand, and before he knew what he was doing, he was patting her on the shoulder.
It was a mistake. Tears brimmed in her eyes and she couldn’t wipe them away because her hands were filled with bottles.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s OK, it’s—’
‘They . . .’ more tears brimmed and slipped down her cheeks, ‘. . . they put a frog in my bed.’
He let his hand fall back to his side. ‘What?’
‘And I hate frogs, I really do. I’m fine with most animals but frogs . . . live ones . . . there’s something about them. I can’t touch them, I can’t pick them up, I just can’t, and I—’
Her voice was getting louder and louder so he took her by the arm, opened the door of her room and steered her inside.
Everything was fine, he was telling himself, in a very clear voice. He was helping her. Just as he helped Vita or Hughie, at night-time, if they had a bad dream. He would remove the frog, he would say goodnight, he would leave. Simple. Everything was fine. He was saying this to himself as he pulled back the sheets of her bed, as he absolutely did not inhale the smell of them, as he stood there in her room, with her behind him. The frog was an arrow-shaped blot on the mattress, legs folded under itself. Gina was there, in a pair of short pyjamas; he was in her room. But he was doing nothing wrong. He was helping her with a school prank.
He put both hands over the frog and it leapt inside his palms, much as a human heart might if lifted from the body.
‘The window,’ he said.
Gina leapt towards it and opened the catch. It swung open and he leant out into the night. In the moment before he released the animal, he was struck by the strangeness, the otherness of the outside – that place out there, devoid of light but pulsing with crickets and birds and invisible creatures. It seemed to him that he had spent weeks, years perhaps, in the closed environment of the youth hostel, with its glaring lights, wood-lined walls, spidery shower stalls, echoing dining hall, narrow bunks, shouting children. But this place, this velvet dark and star-pierced sky, was right here, just outside its walls, and how beautiful it was, how soft the air, how utterly mesmerising its secret noises.
He opened his hands and the frog fell into the undergrowth with a cushioned thud. He heard it rustle, right itself, then spring away. He took one more breath of the night, one last look, then withdrew.
It seemed as if something of the night had entered the room. Gina was still standing there, in her pyjamas, in the gloom, but she had a bottle in her hand, filled with a silver liquid.
‘Don’t look,’ she said, with a small laugh, and she held the bottle to her mouth and tipped it up. He saw her throat constrict once, twice.
She coughed, smiled, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I needed that,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ he said, and reached out.
Did she deliberately misunderstand him? He was reaching for the vodka, of course, not her. He suddenly wanted the fierce, hot path of it down his own throat. He was not reaching for her; it was the bottle he wanted.
Either way, she gave him her hand.
And it seemed to him, as he felt the hand of Gina Mayhew in his, a surprisingly small hand, smaller than – he permitted this thought but no more – Claire’s, that he was reaching through a space that was as vast and limitless as the universe, and that space was stacked with assumptions that he held about himself. Himself as a family man, as a father, as a husband, as a teacher, who never, unlike some colleagues he could mention, eyed the long legs of sixth-form girls in hot exam halls, never responded to the smitten gazes of certain students, never indulged in those staffroom confidences and allegiances and dalliances, a man who had never looked at another woman since his marriage, a man who had wed the girl he knocked up at university at the start of his PhD, who had given up his dreams of being an academic, of escaping to America, of leaving everything behind, a man who did his share of all the washing and lifting and coaxing and feeding and tidying of family life, a man who very frequently drove his mother to Mass, a man who sent birthday cards and purchased presents and carved the turkey at Christmas. He was a good man. He knew that to be true. But still he reached through it all, all that goodness and duty and assiduousness and care, until he got to something else on the other side.
When he woke, it was just after dawn. The window was still open and the outside was nothing again – grey-lit, damp, birds squawking, insects clouding the air. He stumbled from the narrow bunk, unwinding himself from the sheet. His mind was sprinting ahead of the situation in which he had found himself. He had to get out of there, down the corridor, to his own room, without anyone seeing him. What had he done, what had he done, what, in God’s name, had he done? He snatched up his clothes from the floor. It would be OK, he told himself, as he forced one leg then the other into his discarded pyjamas, which seemed
suddenly to be invested with so much static that they would not admit a human limb, it would be OK. He knew that to panic meant to die; he had learnt that in Scouts. Keep calm, keep a clear head, above all don’t panic. It would be fine, he would deal with this, he would get himself out of here and everything would be OK. Claire would not find out, he would not tell her, he would never tell her; it was just the once, it would never happen again. Claire would never know and nothing would change; he would talk to Gina and she would understand. She knew he was married, after all. She’d known that from the start – she’d known it last night when she’d slid herself beneath him in the bed, when she’d lifted her pyjama top over her head. Claire would never know what had happened here. It was a moment of madness but it was over.
He turned the door handle; he poked out his head. Nothing. No one. The corridor was empty. This seemed to him an extraordinary piece of luck, a sign, if you like, that from now on everything would go his way. He would return home; he would put this behind him; he would be a model husband, a perfect father, from now on. Claire would never know.
Impossible, though, to legislate for chance. Who could have predicted that, at the moment he was lifting the frog from Gina Mayhew’s sheets, Hughie, on his way to the toilet in the dark, would trip over a truck left on the landing (and hadn’t Claire warned them, again and again, not to leave toys lying around at the top of the stairs?) and fall against the banisters and need to be taken to hospital in the middle of the night for eight stitches across his brow? Who would have thought that Claire would ever have cause to use the emergency telephone number he’d been leaving stuck to the fridge for the nine years he’d been coming on this trip? And who could guess what went through Claire’s mind as she stood in Casualty, with two wailing children, in the middle of the night, listening to a cross-sounding French youth-hostel worker telling her that her husband was not in his room, that they didn’t know where he was and did she want them to try a different room?
He rolls over on to his back and looks at Aoife. She is sitting with her legs drawn up, her back to the wall. ‘Don’t hate me,’ he says.