She came to stand beside him while he poured. As he handed her the glass his hand touched hers and he felt her shiver. Gently, he ran his forefinger up her arm, tracking the groove between radius and ulna, pressing hard enough to produce a wave-like motion in her flesh. She didn’t pull away. He took the glass from her, set it down on the table and, cradling her face between his hands, began to kiss her, gently at first, barely brushing his lips against hers, letting their breaths mingle, afraid that any sudden movement would send her scurrying away. But then, she began to kiss him back. Soon their arms were twined around each other and he could feel the edge of her ribcage pressing into his chest; he was more aware of that than of her breasts. Her dry skin rubbed against his, as thirsty as sand. His hands slid down to her hips, tilting her pelvis towards him, his mouth found the hollow at the base of her throat …
Instantly, she pushed him away. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t. Don’t ask me, I just can’t.’
‘All right.’ He had to force the words out, producing in the process a hard, scratchy little laugh that shaded uncertainly into tenderness. ‘But at least let’s sit together, you seem terribly far away over there.’
She came and curled up beside him on the sofa. Perhaps that’s what she wanted: a brother’s love. The comfort of long familiarity, without any of the thrill and danger of sex. But no, there’d been real passion in that kiss, and it hadn’t all come from him. She would let him make love to her, if not tonight, then tomorrow. They’d gone beyond the point where either of them wanted to turn back. But it would be completely wrong – and stupid – to go on pressing her now. So he was patient, stroking her arm, talking softly, pleased when he made her laugh.
When it was time for bed, they went upstairs together, passing the tall mirrors that faced each other across the half-landing. Briefly, they became a million couples, their linked reflections stretching away into an unimaginable distance. Even now, he was full of hope. But outside her bedroom door, she stopped and looked up at him, and her face in the lamplight was pinched and old.
‘Well then, goodnight,’ he said, deliberately flattening his voice on the final word to stop it becoming a question.
‘I’ve been sleeping in Toby’s room, I’m afraid I haven’t even got round to changing the sheets.’
‘We’ve slept in the same sheets before.’
He tried to prevent this remark sounding sharp, but he didn’t succeed, and the slight pressure hardened her against him, as he’d known it would.
‘Just go down and make yourself a cup of coffee in the morning,’ she said. ‘Though I’ll probably be up.’
She slipped into her bedroom and the door clicked shut behind her. He rested his hand, briefly, on the cold wood, before walking the few yards further along the corridor to Toby’s room.
It took him only a few minutes to unpack. Apart from his drawing pads, shaving kit and a change of underwear he’d brought next to nothing with him. Then, feeling too tense for sleep, he wandered round the room, looking at books and photographs.
It was very obviously a young man’s room. If Elinor had been sleeping here, she’d left no trace of her presence. He wished he could remember Toby more clearly, but he’d only met him once, that last weekend before the war, and all his memories of that time were of Elinor and Neville. Elinor, awkward and rebellious in her mother’s presence, quite unlike the startlingly self-possessed young woman he knew at the Slade. Neville, his usual bumptious self: almost, but never quite, ridiculous. Toby had just been a fair-haired young man in the background. Paul probably wouldn’t have noticed him at all, if it hadn’t been for his extraordinary resemblance to Elinor. Curiously, Toby had been beautiful, whereas Elinor, even at her best, just missed beauty, though Paul found her more attractive because she didn’t have that final, daunting perfection.
Apart from that, the weekend was a jumble of random recollections: newspapers on the terrace, fields of corn bending in the wind, shadows of clouds fleeing across them, Neville’s pink, excited face as he came into the drawing room after dinner to announce that Russia had mobilized. Paul hadn’t known what to make of it all; he’d swung between bursts of wild excitement and complete indifference. Wars were fought by professional armies. Once the novelty wore off, he couldn’t see this making much difference to his life.
The photographs were mainly of cricket and rugby teams. Nothing more recent than Toby’s schooldays, not even a graduation photograph, though there was one on the piano downstairs. This was a room frozen in time, and not at the moment of Toby’s death. No, long before that, possibly when he left home to live in London. You got the impression that on subsequent visits he’d brought very little of himself back.
But then, that was true of Paul as well. On his rare visits to see his father and stepmother in Middlesbrough he always felt as if he were impersonating the boy he’d once been. It was impossible to feel comfortable; even in his old bed, his shoulder blades refused to fit the hollows in the mattress left by a shorter version of himself.
A row of books lined the shelf above the mantelpiece. He ran his fingers along the spines, selecting a volume here and there for a closer look. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, heavily underlined throughout, little self-conscious comments written in the margins. Obviously a school prize: the name and date written in a rounded, still unformed hand. Treasure Island. Another prize, but much earlier. On the flyleaf, Toby had written his name and address: ‘Tobias Antony Brooke, Leybourne Farm, Netherton, Sussex, England, Great Britain, Europe, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, the Universe.’
Paul was smiling as he closed the book. That little boy was suddenly a powerful presence in the room. He picked up a photograph, the only one, as far as he could see, of Toby as an individual rather than a member of a team. The image was overexposed, so one side of his face had faded into white. Looking at it, Paul could almost believe he heard a faint echo of the explosion that had blown this laughing boy into unidentifiable gobs of flesh. The poignancy of a young life cut short. He hadn’t known Toby, but at this moment he could have cried for him: the small boy who’d located himself so precisely in the world, and now was nowhere.
Thoroughly unsettled, Paul got into bed and turned off the lamp. Lying on his back, listening to the night sounds that came through the open window, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The sheets smelled of Elinor’s hair and skin. He wondered whether they’d been changed since Toby’s last leave, but yes, surely they would’ve been: the shrine-keeping would have started with his death. The room was a shrine, but there was nothing unusual in that: thousands of women were tending shrines to dead young men. Many of them went to seances, and were battened on by people who claimed to be able to contact the dead. There were even some who produced photographs of the dead man’s spirit hovering behind his loved ones. Well, Elinor didn’t need that: she had her paintings. Was there even one in which Toby didn’t appear? Tomorrow, he’d ask Elinor if he could look at them again.
If tomorrow ever came. He was afraid of nightmares. He’d worked out little rituals to fend them off, routines he went through every night at bedtime, but nothing worked for long. And tonight, made restless by desire and with far too much alcohol coursing through his veins, he knew he was in for a bad time.
An owl hooted. And again. And again. Perhaps there were two, calling to each other? Some dispute over territory that would not be resolved in blood. He lay, listening. An owl’s cry is such a knowing sound. As he drifted off, he found himself wondering what it was that these owls knew. Their cries pursued him through the thickets of sleep. He was stumbling over tree roots in the depths of a winter forest, so still that a solitary leaf, falling, fractured the silence. But then, from somewhere up ahead, came the sound of a branch creaking. The noise fretted his sleep until, at last, he came awake with a cry, his heart thudding against his ribs. He’d heard something. Perhaps no more than a floorboard creaking, but somehow the sound had wound its way into h
is dream. Then he caught the soft slur of naked feet, and, clearly visible in the violent moonlight, the knob of the door began to turn.
Elinor slipped into the room, a slight figure in a white nightdress.
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
‘Can’t you sleep?’ he asked.
‘It’s the owls, I’ve never heard them like this before.’
Still half drowned in sleep, he shifted towards the wall and patted the counterpane, inviting her to sit down.
Instead, she slipped her nightdress off her shoulders and let it fall around her feet. His throat was too swollen to let him speak. Silently, he held the covers open and welcomed her into his arms.
Twelve
Next morning, he woke to find her still sleeping, curled up against his side like a medieval carving of Eve, newly born of Adam – and how scathing Elinor would have been about that. Looking down at her, he noticed again the sharpness of her bones. He was tempted to wake her, but resisted and edged out of bed.
She woke as he reached the door.
‘It’s freezing,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you put that on?’
She was pointing to a dark grey coat that hung on the back of the door. As he put it on, the cloth released a masculine whiff of tobacco and hair oil. She lay looking up at him as he stood there, in Toby’s coat. He thought it must be painful for her to see him like that, but no, she was smiling, though her eyes were darkening as the engorged pupils swallowed the blue.
She pulled him down on to the bed and started kissing him, as hungrily as if they’d never made love. He struggled to free himself from the heavy coat, but as often as he tried to shrug it off, she pulled it on again, and, suddenly, he thought: No. He rolled off her, swept a kiss across her forehead to soften the rejection, and stood up.
‘Coffee?’
She pouted. ‘That’s not very flattering.’
‘Man cannot live on love alone.’
In a hurry to be gone, he went downstairs. The coat’s silk lining, warmed by his body, had produced an unpleasant clamminess, like the touch of skin on skin. He would have liked to take it off, but the kitchen was cold.
While waiting for the water to boil, he went across the yard to the barn. As he opened the door he caught ghost smells of hay and cattle, though this couldn’t have been a working farm for years. Before its conversion into a studio, the barn would have housed only gardening tools and a lawnmower, certainly not cattle. The lawnmower was still there, a heap of earth-smelling sacks piled up beside it. At the centre of the open space, a wood stove, crusted with rust, squatted in its own shadow.
He touched the cloth on the easel, but didn’t pull it off. He hated people looking at his own uncompleted work and he wouldn’t do it to her. Slowly, methodically, he worked through the finished paintings, admiring, doubting, more than once feeling a stab of envy at what she’d achieved. He was Toby-hunting. Only one landscape was genuinely empty: the fields behind the house in winter. Cropped hawthorn hedges ran across a vast expanse of snow, like lines of Hebrew script. Even here, though, a shadow between the trees revealed itself, on closer examination, to be the head and shoulders of a man. She hadn’t left him out of anything.
When, eventually, he carried two cups of coffee upstairs, he found her sleeping. It was almost a relief. Quickly, he scooped up his clothes and went along to the bathroom, where he washed and shaved, avoiding, as far as possible, his own gaze in the mirror. He didn’t want to think.
Downstairs again, he made a pot of tea, spread butter thinly over a crust of bread and forced it down. The house seemed to have turned against him. Even Hobbes, curled up in his basket by the dead fire, opened one bloodshot eye, only to close it again when he saw Paul. He no longer felt welcome. Images from last night clung like bats to the inside of his skull; he needed a blast of cold morning air to shake them off. He put on his coat, his own coat this time, thank God, and went out.
He chose the path through the woods. It was still dark, though on the fringes of the wood the trees were beginning to let in shafts of stronger light. Frost, everywhere. A single leaf fell to the ground and immediately he was back inside the landscape of his dream. The girl in the white nightdress belonged in that dream. Nothing that had happened between them belonged to the waking world. He went on his way, rustling through dead leaves, cracking twigs, breathing heavily, no doubt in a fug of his own hot stink. All around him, he felt small animals shrink into the shelter of the trees.
He came out into an open field enclosed by hawthorn hedges. Because he’d just been looking at Elinor’s painting, he saw the place through her eyes, more clearly than he could have seen it on his own. Thorns pulled at his sleeves. He blew on his fingertips to warm them, but the real chill was in his memories of last night.
Something had been wrong from the start. He’d felt it, but pushed on anyway, he couldn’t stop; and he’d thought he could make it all right. But even in the most passionate moments – and there weren’t many – Elinor had seemed to pull away. Of course, she was grieving for her brother … And it wasn’t as if he didn’t know about grief; his mother had killed herself when he was fourteen. It had taken him years to get over it: if he ever had. It seemed, looking back, that he’d grown around the loss, that it had become part of him, as trees will sometimes incorporate an obstruction, so they end up living, but deformed. He certainly didn’t underestimate what Elinor was going through. Only he’d felt there was something else, a shadow falling across them, cast by something he couldn’t see. He’d never known lovemaking like it. It had felt like a battle, not between the two of them – there’d been no antagonism – no, more like he was struggling to pull her out of a pit and sometimes she’d wanted to come with him, and at other times she’d turned back into the dark.
Always before, even at the most difficult moments in their long, wrangling love affair, sex had never failed them. Last night, it had.
He’d hoped to find her downstairs waiting for him when he returned, but the kitchen was empty. No fire; only one log left in the basket. Well, however useless he’d been in bed, at least he could chop wood. He went across the yard to the fuel store, where he found a pile of logs and an axe.
The first blow sent shock waves up his arm. He freed the axe, struck again, and the two halves fell sweetly apart. A smell of raw wood, sharp on the cold air. He was reaching for another log when he realized Elinor had come up behind him. She smelled of oil paint and turps, and that smell, mingling with the more feminine scents of skin and hair, took him back to the Slade and ‘the wild girls’. They were the best thing about the Slade, those girls. The memory softened him towards her.
‘Did you have a good morning?’ he asked.
‘Quite good.’
He sensed her excitement. ‘I’ll just finish these, then I’ll come in.’
‘Have you been for a walk?’
‘Just up the hill there. I wish I’d had a gun, I could’ve got you some rabbits. Place was hopping.’
‘You’re a town boy, aren’t you? Who taught you to shoot?’
‘The army,’ he said. Very dry.
‘Oh, yes, of course. Sorry.’
She was blushing. He positioned the next log and swung the axe, smiling to himself as the blade bit.
Five minutes later, he came into the kitchen carrying an armful of logs. She was by the range, heating up the remains of last night’s stew. He put a hand on her shoulder and she turned round; her face was pale, but her eyes glittered with barely suppressed excitement.
‘You have had a good day,’ he said.
‘The thing is, I think I might have finished. But you never really know, do you?’
‘Let it settle.’
He began to build up the fire, feeling an immense, simple satisfaction as he saw the first lick of flame. Holding a sheet of old, yellowing newspaper across the fireplace, he heard the roar of the draught behind it. Columns of names curled and blackened in the heat. Worse than the Somme, people were saying, as the lists grew long
er day by day. A black hole edged with sallow gold appeared at the centre of the page and he whisked the paper away in a whirl of smoke and sparks. ‘There.’
Elinor was ladling steaming stew into two big bowls. He sat at the table and reached across for the loaf. Elinor passed him the knife. They were a good team, he thought. In surprising, simple ways they made a good team.
‘Do you really think it’s finished?’ he asked.
‘Well, I don’t know. I thought it was.’
She looked pinched now, coming down the other side and, my God, he knew every step of the way. ‘Can I see it?’
‘If you like. Not now, though. Let’s eat.’
Paul fetched a bottle from the dresser and poured them both a glass. ‘Congratulations.’
‘You haven’t seen it yet.’
But she clinked glasses with him and took the first sip. By the time she’d finished the glass, she’d lost that white, glittery look and was back among the living. They ate the stew, which was actually rather better than last night, and she seemed more interested in him. Or perhaps she was just being polite.
‘How have you been, really, since you got back?’
He decided to tell the truth. ‘Pretty bad. I mean, the leg … well, there’s nothing to be done about that, I’m lumbered with it. But I can’t seem to fit back in. You know, I go to the Café Royal, I make myself go, and it’s like I’ve landed on another planet. And sometimes I just drift off in the middle of a conversation and …’
‘But you’ll get past that.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
As soon as they’d finished eating, she stood up. ‘I want to show you something.’
Of course, the painting. He got to his feet.
‘No, you stay there, I’ll bring it down.’
She was gone no more than two minutes. When she came back she was holding a piece of paper: crumpled, stained, with that unmistakable smell. Oh, God, the last letter.