I calmed myself. It was nothing to do with me, and he didn’t want my sympathy. I was the instrument, making the order, that was all. I nodded as if to acknowledge anything that he might want me to acknowledge. When he’d gone I closed my eyes for a few seconds and thought of a white blank wall. Then I allowed the next case to flood in on top of the blankness.
Another packed list today. Five more minutes, and the usher will start sending them in. The minutes always seem elastic when they’re about to run out, as if you could do anything you want in them. And no room is ever more private than this one becomes, when I know someone’s about to open the door.
It’s too hot to eat. I open a can of Coke and drink it straight from the can, though it’s tepid now. It was ice-cold when it clunked out of the machine in the garage on the way here, I love that sweat of cold on my hand. I never drink Coke at home. I’m always trying to get the kids to drink tap-water, or squash at least, telling them it will rot their teeth if they drink cans. But they have iron-hard fluoride teeth, not like mine. I wonder if I’ve got a rim around my mouth. Better check.
‘You don’t look like a judge.’ I can’t remember who said that. It could have been any one of my friends, and they are right. There is no severity in my face, but I wonder how many of the faces that look into this mirror have fought as hard to be here as I have. I have the gift of not marking easily, that’s all, or not seeming to mark.
There are footsteps in the corridor, quick but never light. Someone else’s disgrace, walking rapidly towards them.
THREE
Most days I get up early, while the house is silent. I slide out of bed and into jeans and a heavy sweater. I work, or I go out and walk across the fields to the sea. The world feels private then. I like the chill of morning, and the quiet sea. Sometimes I see a ferry sliding past on the horizon, with its lights still on. There will be people looking out of their portholes and seeing the low line of the land. They’ll yawn, say to themselves that there’s nothing worth seeing yet, and lie back in their bunks.
But when you get to know them you could look at the marshes for ever. They are full of secrets. They look as if they lie open to the sky, offering everything, but they don’t. You have to live with them day by day, through the changes of light and water and sky and wind. Suddenly you realize you don’t know them at all. You’re just at the outside edge, perhaps, of beginning to know something.
We are two miles outside the village, and the sounds come to me one by one, slow enough to count. A tractor coughs, then settles into heavy noise as it comes down the lane, stops by the gate, and passes through, dragging a trailer for the sheep which are going to market this morning. The sky is a broken ripple of cloud. It’s too clear, it’ll rain later. I love the sound of rain falling around this house.
Donald doesn’t like it. The boys don’t either. They hated me for dragging us all here, away from the city and everything they knew. They didn’t know our reasons.
‘I won’t get this chance again,’ I told them. ‘If I don’t go for this job, I might not get another.’ The boys watched us packing up and making phone calls and being busy, and they never seemed to catch the smell of our fear. Donald was afraid, we were both afraid. As soon as I saw this house I wanted to be here, with all the light around me. I was leaving the city and the place where both the children had been born. I didn’t want to have to walk past my old life every day.
This house is stone, and it’s cold. We haven’t put in heating yet. We got through one winter without it, and we can get through another. There is so much debt. Our last house was loaded with debt, mortgaged and then remortgaged. We’d sold everything, gone through all those bits of savings which are meant to see you through bad times. We were lucky: we were able to get a new mortgage on the strength of my new job. This house is in my name only. We had to do it, because of the debts in Donald’s name. We can’t take the risk. But he hates it. It makes him feel as if he’s not at home here.
The boys had an electric heater in their room last winter. I told them they could switch it on for an hour before they went to bed, and half an hour in the morning. There are no carpets upstairs, but I took up the linoleum and scrubbed the boards. They are warm, wide planks of pine. We had open fires downstairs. We are paying our debts, though it’s like running against the tide. The bank takes so much; the interest I can handle, but not the charges for every letter, every review, every meeting with a bank manager who isn’t competent to do anything on his own authority anyway. I feel so angry. I’m not angry in my head, I’m angry in my body. It feels intimate, this pawing over of our finances, like a sexual humiliation.
Every time I walk on the beach I bring back driftwood for the fires. There’s a stack of it now under a tarpaulin, at the side of the house. Some of it is white as bone, and there are planks and great knotted tree-trunks which the sea tosses up as lightly as lolly-sticks when there’s a storm. We don’t get much muck around here. Not too many indestructible plastic tampon applicators, or condoms. The water is grey, cold, salty.
I can’t concentrate on my work this morning. I go to the window, kneel down, lean my elbows on the low sill. The flood of white light is so bright that I blink. We could be far out at sea ourselves. All summer I’ve heard the ewes and lambs calling to one another. The lambs are born late down here. The sheep are shorn late, too. The marsh is bleak and bare and the wind blows all winter long. It snatches your breath as you come out of the house. It makes your skin burn.
We can’t see the sea from here, because the rising lip of sea-wall cuts it off. Beyond the sea-wall there’s a ragged, pebbly beach. There’s no road to it, so no one comes. If you look closely, you see that the grass at the edge of the beach is studded with speedwell and pimpernel, among the straw and flotsam. I walk there most days, with the sea on one side and the wall on the other. All the land here is below sea-level.
Here comes the rain. If I hurry, I’ve got time for a swim.
Donald sleeps. A gust of wind comes just before the rain and the house booms softly, like a touched drum. Donald is lost in the dreams he never remembers when he wakes. He tells me he doesn’t dream. He frowns, his face clenched. In his sleep his easy, open smile disappears. The dream gains force, shoving him upward into day. Alarm clock. It rings on while his hand flails. He stabs down the button and subsides beneath the warm used sheets. He smells the heat of his body and my absence. Each morning it grates to find me gone and busy while he is still sleeping. He’d like for once to roll over and see me sleeping on my back, face open and abandoned, a drop of spittle at the corner of my mouth. The rain spatters on the windows. Got to get those frames repainted. One more winter like last and they’ll rot through. He’s never lived anywhere there’s so much weather.
He hears my footsteps but doesn’t turn. Let me think he’s asleep. My bare feet tap on the floor. Now I’m above him, looking down. He can feel me.
‘It’s time to get up,’ I say. He rolls over and squints up at me. I’ve screwed my hair up on top of my head, and I’m dressed in an old tracksuit.
‘Did you go out?’
‘Yes. I’ve been down to the sea.’
He knows I’m better when I’ve been out, down to the sea. I touch my palm to his forehead. My hand is so cold he flinches.
‘I’ve been swimming,’ I say.
‘Jesus. What time is it?’
‘I told you. Time to get up.’
‘You shouldn’t swim on your own down there.’
But he knows I always will. I swim naked. There’s no one to see. The water is grey and clean, and I know the tides. Although it’s a cool September, the sea has the warmth of the summer in it. I love it. He feels along my hand, my arm.
‘You’re freezing. You’ll catch cold.’
‘You can’t catch cold in salt water.’
I take off my tracksuit top. Now I am bare to the waist, my nipples standing out stiff and dark. A trail of salt water runs down from the wet hair at my neck, hesitates, then slither
s over my collar bone. I bend, and he licks the drop of salt, and tastes my body under the taste of the sea. I hook my fingers in the tracksuit pants and pull them down. He lifts the quilt like a tent-flap and I wriggle in. I am so cold that he shrinks back from me, then he seizes hold of me as if he is plunging into cold water himself, and wraps his arms around me, tight. I don’t pull away, but I shudder as if his warmth is ice. He feels for the warm slippery channel between my legs, but I’m cold there too.
One of the boys shouts in the bedroom and I tense to listen. My eyes snap open. Joe.
‘Ssh,’ says Donald, not to me or Joe but to the listening thing in me that turns me away from him, just as we are coming close. He runs his hands up and down me, fast, trying to get the blood heat of the bed into my hips, my breasts, my cold belly with its knot of navel that is looser since the boys came. The cold has made me solid. I feel as if I’m come back wrapped in another element, one he’ll never penetrate. I turn my head, open my eyes, open my mouth and kiss his wide mouth. When he smiles the rounding of his cheek looks like a distortion.
At the end of the kiss I lick my lips. ‘I’m so dry. My lips are cracking.’
‘You shouldn’t swim so much,’ he says. You shouldn’t go so far out. How far out did you go?’
I pull against him. ‘Not far,’ I say, and touch the damp, sweaty hair in his groin. ‘Not far.’
‘You should stay with me. I’ll look after you,’ he says. He dives down my body, rasping his unshaven chin over my stomach. ‘You don’t smell of anything,’ he says, raising his head. ‘You’re so clean you don’t smell like you.’
‘It’s OK,’ I say. I feel my voice changing, the way it does, dampening and thickening. ‘You can muck me up.’ I kick back the quilt and stare down our bodies. Behind his head there is the grey square of the window, the grey stone round it, the pale streaming marshes. The wind drowns the tick of the postman’s bike.
I hold Donald tight. He’s drifting. His body is loose and content in my arms. He gives me a drowsy smile, so open it makes my heart contract. The rain spits on the glass, the wind whines and the house seems to rock, with us inside it. I can lie here in the hollow of the bed, in the seaweed smell of sex. The bed seems to rise and fall beneath me.
I can allow myself ten minutes by the clock whose hands turn calmly on the table, at eye-level. At the outside, fifteen, if I drive fast and the gates of the level crossing aren’t down. The children won’t wake until we wake them. I shift my legs and Donald says, without opening his eyes, ‘Don’t get up yet.’
‘It’s all right. You stay here.’
I want this day never to begin. I want them all to stay like this, Donald, Joe, Matt, floating in and out of sleep as the house floats on its foundations above the marsh. I want them to believe they’re safe. There is money coming into the house, my money, weighing down the scales against the debts. I know how Donald is. I don’t need to watch him or weigh him up or check up on him, because he’s always in my mind. We don’t use words like breakdown, we never have. We step lightly round it. We have got past those nights when I’d find him up at two, at three, at four in the morning, sleepless and frozen. There would be little whisky glasses round him and a tide of newspaper which he’d let flow from his lap. He would order two or three newspapers a day and never read them. He’d get muddled and forget he had a whisky glass already, and fetch another. And then he left the top off the bottle so one day Matt got up before I did and kicked it over the carpet. It wasn’t the drink that bothered me. It was the hot, hurt look in Donald’s eyes that the drink couldn’t extinguish.
One night I woke to find him sitting on the bed watching me in the light that came through from the landing. I could tell he’d been there a long time, watching me as if he was never going to see me again. I pretended I hadn’t noticed. I said I felt hungry, and I got up and made us both some scrambled eggs and then we watched a film together. I remember it had Marilyn Monroe in it. I didn’t follow the plot much, but the noise of the film was a way of holding things back, like the big mugs of tea I kept making.
When the children woke they were jealous of us, because we’d been up while they were sleeping. And because we were sitting close up together on the sofa. Joe crammed himself in between me and Donald, and I thought how perfect his face was, with the night warmth on it and that almost inhuman beauty children have when they’re flushed and ruffled with sleep. And I thought that nothing was going to destroy us. Nothing was going to make their faces clamp shut.
He was thinking of leaving us. He couldn’t live with the thought that he’d failed us, lost our money, dragged us into debt. That night when I woke he was fixing our faces in mind, for when he was gone. He had been in the boys’ room too, watching them while they slept. It was only a question of weeks, he said. They couldn’t go on. They’d made so many mistakes. He could see that now. All that expansion, the loans, the clients who went bust and couldn’t pay. Money will make money, that’s what they’d thought when they went to the bank for the loans which went on bigger premises, and more staff, and a networked computer system. Money well spent will make money.
I didn’t ask him then what he meant by leaving. It was too dangerous. I was afraid that any question would boot him into action. I could see the brink in front of us and how we had to move back softly, step by step, never letting on that we’d seen the fall we might have fallen.
It was going to have to go. Donald was going to come out of the partnership with nothing but debts. He had worked fifteen years to build it up. It had been the centre of his life as long as I’d known him. Donald is not the kind of man to talk of his dreams. He says he never dreams. He’d have some good years, a few that were not so bad and then three dry years when he fought to hold off the bank with everything we had. And now it was the middle of the night and I had to think quickly.
I’d been sitting as a deputy district judge for four years. I knew I was good. I did it five or six days a month, and the rest of the time I worked in my own practice. It was mainly a legal aid practice, so there wasn’t much money in it, and it was tough and tiring. But I liked it and I had plenty of clients. I had my office on a street corner, with windows looking two ways down onto the pavements awash with people. There was a flower shop opposite, and a supermarket that never closed. I knew everybody and I knew exactly the hesitant sound the downstairs door made when it was a first-time client. Every lawyer is a bit of an actor. The clients would come in away from the cold street, the dust and billowing chip-papers, and I would ease it all out of them and they would believe the reassurance they saw in my face.
It was an old, crooked building, with narrow stairs where one person had to stand aside to allow the other to come up. The walls of my office were uneven. There was a little Victorian grate behind my desk, with blue tiles round it, and yellow lilies on the tiles. I bought some blacklead and blackleaded the grate so the iron glowed with a dull coaly gleam. On winter mornings I would come in early and light the fire. I liked to see the look on the clients’ faces when they came in heavy with trouble or prickling with the desperate need to put their story, which no one else believed or wanted to hear. They would see the yellow flames unpeeling from the coal, and the heap of red slumped in the bottom of the grate, and they’d pause for a second, and their faces would change. What I liked best was the afternoons in midwinter, when the streets were thick with early dusk and the lights were coming on in the opposite block, and I’d have a break between clients to catch up with my paperwork. I’d put another shovel of coal on the fire and let it burn up, and I’d turn the computer keyboard and swivel my chair so I could watch the flames.
I got into computers early. It made up for the way I gave clients more time than I should have done. I was never going to make real money, but I paid my share of the bills and for the boys’ nursery. I kept going, and I was always good in court. You have to focus on what’s really going to win the case: it sounds simple, but it isn’t. And if I thought I needed more time on a case
I’d take it. There was no one standing over me with a time-recording sheet, telling me I wasn’t ever going to keep my costs up if I worked like this, the way there is in most big legal practices now. If I thought I was going to get home on a case, I wasn’t often wrong.
That’s all gone. It went the night Donald turned to me after we’d eaten the scrambled eggs and said, ‘They’re going to make me bankrupt if this goes on. And I’m fucked if I’ll do that to you and the kids.’
His eyes were rimmed with lack of sleep. Not red, but blackish lines that had been getting deeper for days. His voice was light, with no emphasis in it. We were going to sink. The water of debt was going to go over our heads and then Donald would leave us. He wouldn’t want to do it, but the only way he’d be able to live with what was happening would be to get as far away from us as he could. Not to see our faces.
‘That’s not going to happen,’ I said, as if he was one of the boys waking from a nightmare of losing me and running all up and down the supermarket and never being able to find me.
‘Of course it’ll happen,’ said Donald. ‘I’ve done the figures. And the bank’s on to us now. Another couple of months like this and we’re finished. More than finished. Completely fucked. And I can’t do it. I won’t be able to write a cheque, do you know that? I won’t be able to do anything. I know we’ve got to close, Simone, but I’m not going to go through the hoop. I’m fucked if I’ll do it.’
‘It’s not going to happen,’ I said again. ‘I’ll get the money.’
Donald looked at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s just not realistic. Even with what you get from your part-time district judging, you can’t keep us going. Let alone pay off debts like this. It’s a free fucking advice centre you’re running down there, not a business.’