This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Daniel is still ranting: ‘She’s even got Niall there now, telling him God knows what, getting him on her side. I don’t know how she does it, how she exerts this power over—’

  ‘It was you who sent Niall to her. Remember? You even drew him a map so he could find the house. And you know what? It was exactly the right thing to do. Niall is doing really well, he’s—’

  ‘He is?’

  From across the littered room, Daniel looks at him, chest heaving.

  Lucas nods. ‘I was there two weeks ago. Niall is in good form.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Claudette has him out in the greenhouse, tending her courgette plants. He’s teaching the kids geology. They go off on walks together with these little hammer things. Calvin has a rock collection now. Niall’s helping him label and classify it.’ Lucas pauses. ‘She wants to be fair to you. She wants it to be amicable. She says she’ll give you however much you—’

  ‘I don’t want her goddamn money,’ Daniel snaps. ‘She knows that.’

  ‘Well, either way, she wants you to see the kids. She just doesn’t want them to see you like this.’

  Daniel glowers at him, fists clenched.

  ‘Can you understand that? She wants more than anything for you to be a father to them but, Daniel, think about it. Would you want Marithe to see you in this state? Would you want her to come to this flat, to spend the night? Can you picture her and Calvin here, as it is right now?’

  Daniel drops his gaze.

  ‘You need to find a way through this,’ Lucas says. ‘You need to get yourself together. Do you think you can do that? Daniel? Do you?’

  Always to Be Losing Things

  Rosalind, Bolivia, 2015

  When the driver comes, stumping wordlessly out of the hut, laden with sacks of food and flagons of water, and flings open the doors of the truck, the group of waiting people seem to hesitate, hang back, to gaze up at the sky or glance at their watches or make some final adjustments to their backpacks.

  Nobody, Rosalind sees, wants to get in first. Nobody wants the back seat.

  Suppressing a teacherly sigh (because, really, isn’t this the kind of behaviour more suited to children on a school trip?), she steps forward, places her bag on the dirt track and climbs in.

  The interior of the truck, van, whatever you want to call it – it resembles most a Land Rover her uncle used to drive, a lifetime ago in Suffolk – is airless, musky and smells vaguely mouldy. A fecund, lichenous, hothouse scent. Rosalind seats herself in the furthest corner, by the window: she isn’t prepared to forgo that privilege.

  She and this group of people, none of whom she has ever met before, are to spend the next few days making their way by truck to the Salar de Uyuni, a salt desert in the Bolivian Altiplano.

  When she booked her place, the man in the little adobe house that served as the tour office had looked at her doubtfully, taking in her silk shirt, her sleek white hair, held back in a velvet band, her gold earrings, her pigskin document case. It is, madam, he had said, in halting, formal English, very rough. No hotel room. Dormitory only. She had replied, in her flawless Spanish, honed from three decades of living in South America: No me importa. It doesn’t matter. Nothing, you see, she had to stop herself saying to him, matters any more.

  Rosalind directs her gaze at their destination but the periphery of her vision takes in her fellow passengers as they clamber in. What the back seat may lack in comfort is made up for in vantage-point.

  The large, bespectacled man is the first to board, just as she’d somehow suspected – he is closest in age to her, albeit younger by a couple of decades – folding up his considerable height to fit through the door. He is succeeded by the Swiss couple, a boy with a grimy tracksuit top, half a beard and his bafflingly beautiful girlfriend. The boy puts out his cigarette before he gets on board, Rosalind is pleased to see, but throws the butt on the ground. They, with the self-assurance peculiar to youth, slide themselves onto the front seat, beside the driver, thereby securing themselves the best view. The lone man in his late twenties, who has not yet spoken a word, climbs in last. He makes no eye contact with any of them and sits in the middle row before proceeding to unpack some kind of equipment, possibly photographic, piece by piece.

  ‘Mind if I sit here?’ The tall man is asking, in an American accent, indicating the seat beside her, stooping in the confined space, grimacing slightly, as if the movement gives him pain.

  Rosalind gestures assent with an open palm and he sits down with a crash, causing her to ricochet upwards, once, twice.

  She has never been substantial of physique. Like a bird, her lacrosse teacher at school used to say, but a quick one. ‘Nightingale’, her husband had called her, in the early days of their marriage. ‘Spry’ is the word used for people of her age, isn’t it? Horrible word, Rosalind reflects, like a mixture of ‘spray’ and ‘why’.

  She turns her face towards the window, just as her seat companion speaks: ‘So, you’re going on the trek?’

  I would have thought that was fairly obvious, she wants to reply, but has had experience of Americans taking this kind of dry British remark the wrong way so keeps it to herself, merely nodding and saying, ‘Yes.’ She then feels that the single word might come across as rather reserved, so adds: ‘I’m very much looking forward to it.’

  The bespectacled American is expending a great deal of effort patting his pockets, leaning forward and back, delving into his jacket, inside and out.

  ‘Have you lost something?’ Rosalind enquires.

  ‘No … It’s just … I thought I had …’ He twists round to find his bag, twists back, then yanks his passport out of it. ‘Oh. There it is.’

  Rosalind bestows upon him one of her understanding yet distant smiles: the ones she used to use for the servants, for her husband’s secretaries, for waiting staff at receptions and parties. The smile that says, while I am fully appraised of and sympathetic to your plight, I do not wish to involve myself further. The last thing she needs on this trip is to take charge, to feel responsible for a disorganised male.

  Two months ago – can it really have only been that long? – she had been going through the contents of the high cupboards in their bedroom, with a view to what she should take, what she should leave for the servants, what she should throw away. Her husband had been a foreign correspondent in Chile for over twenty years and they had lived all that time in a house high up in the Santiago hills, with its terrace hung with bougainvillaea, the parrots that screeched in the mornings, its irrigation pipes of verdigrised copper. And now they were leaving: her husband was retiring, and they were going to live in a cottage in Dorset, near where he had grown up. She had seen photographs of the cottage: it had a blue door and red splashes of hollyhocks growing up the walls and windows latticed with lead. There was a kitchen with an electric cooker: she would have to learn to cook again. She used to know, a long time ago; she was sure she would remember. There they would be, in bucolic retired bliss, with the hollyhocks and the electric cooker, for ever, or for at least as long as they wanted.

  But the problem was these papers. These lists of figures. These columns of debit, these total amounts now due, these receipts of payment sent. There were bills for in-college dining, for extra-curricular sports, for chess club. There were charges for bedding, for heating, for textbooks.

  Rosalind had gone through them all, one by one. She had arranged them chronologically, as was her wont, the most recent on top. She had the urge to find a file for them. She even thought about clipping them together.

  They were from a college in Canada: that much she could comprehend. But it was the name that was bothering her. Samuel Reeves. Samuel L. Reeves. Samuel Lionel Reeves.

  ‘Lionel’ she recognised: it was her husband’s name. ‘Reeves’ she recognised: again, it was her husband’s and it had been hers for forty-five years. But ‘Samuel’ she did not recognise. She didn’t know anyone of that name and, she was quite sure, neither did her husban
d.

  But it seems he did. It seems he knew this boy, this chess-playing, rock-climbing, chemistry-major boy, who required heating and bedding and food, who needed books and sports jackets and extra tuition in something listed as statistical analysis. It seems he knew him very well. Well enough to pay for his college education, for his rent and bills, books and tuition. Which must, she reasoned, as she sat on the bed, mean he knew him very well indeed.

  The truck starts up and Rosalind feels a dart of excitement. She sits forward, gripping the seat in front. They are off! She feels as she had done when the train that would whisk her off to boarding-school had started: ahead of her was potential, was life, was above all, release.

  Someone on a boat in Patagonia had told her about these trucks that took travellers across the salt flats: a German man with a ponytail and a lisp. You should see it, he had said, and swung his head from side to side. It is like nowhere else you’ve ever been, like nowhere else you’ve ever seen.

  The concept, as much as the inadvertent rhyming couplet, had appealed to her.

  In the last two months, Rosalind has climbed Machu Picchu with some gap-year kids. She has been to the Atacama Desert, visited a witches’ market in La Paz. She has swum in a thermal pool, been massaged with volcanic mud and hiked through an araucaria forest. She declined to go white-water rafting on account of her contact lenses but she did cycle along the world’s most dangerous road, which was over-hung with waterfalls and pitted with crosses marking places where people had died, at the end of which was just a town with a square and an ice-cream shop and a hotel with a murky pool and soporific fish and a DVD player and a stack of dubbed Hollywood movies. She wanted nothing more than to go somewhere that was like nowhere else she’d ever been: that was, in a nutshell, exactly what she wanted.

  So here she was. Off in a vibrating, rattling van, her backpack lashed to the roof, her walking boots and sunscreen at the ready, in search of an ancient prehistoric lake, dried out by the sun, in search of a place where the white desert meets the blue sky.

  Without warning, the hitherto silent lone man on the seat in front of her utters the word ‘Dad?’

  Rosalind could not have been more surprised, until the American answers, ‘Yeah?’ without looking up from his guidebook.

  Rosalind watches, fascinated. These two know each other? They are father and son? They had all been in that hut, waiting for the truck to arrive, for over two hours and neither of them had given the slightest sign that they were together. They had sat, she remembers now, on opposite sides of the hut, each looking out of the window. (The Swiss couple had pawed each other briefly, then settled down to gaze at photographs of themselves on their phones.)

  Stupid of her, really, she thinks, as she covertly glances from one man to the other. They actually look very alike.

  ‘Can you hold this for a second?’ the son is saying.

  The American puts out his hand, still without looking up, and the other man, the son, places into it a piece of machinery. Some kind of dial with wires trailing from it.

  ‘What is that?’ Rosalind asks. She can’t help herself.

  The father glances at her, then back at his book. He has startlingly blue eyes, an unusual blue, not pale, not dark but somewhere in between, and a heavy, emphatic brow. ‘It’s part of a seismograph,’ he says, ‘a machine that measures—’

  ‘I know what a seismograph is.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course.’ She rearranges the bag on her lap. Men could be so arrogant. ‘I’ve just never seen one before.’

  ‘Well, OK.’ He inserts a finger into his book, to mark his place. ‘You’ll see one later today. Niall is going to take some readings.’

  They both regard the back of the son’s head. He doesn’t turn round but continues working on his machinery, fitting one part of it into another, straightening a wire, lifting a valve of some sort to his mouth and blowing away the dust.

  ‘Of the Salar de Uyuni?’ Rosalind asks the back of his head. ‘What for?’

  They leave a pause for the son to answer, which he doesn’t.

  ‘He’s a scientist,’ the father says, as if this explains everything.

  ‘Here in Bolivia?’

  ‘No, New York.’

  ‘I see,’ Rosalind says. She switches to her drawing-men-out mode. She prides herself on being adept at this. ‘The two of you work together? A father and son seismology team? How very unusual.’

  ‘No,’ he shakes his head, ‘we don’t work together. Niall is the seismologist but I’m just …’ he seems to hesitate ‘… I was … I’m not working at the moment. I …’

  He grinds to a halt. A terrible crevasse has somehow opened up in the conversation. Rosalind can almost see it there in the truck, as it speeds through scenery that isn’t yet spectacular, just generic South American plain – scrubby cacti, a few haughty-faced llamas, gravelled verges – as the Swiss couple settle themselves down for a conjoined nap. She seems to have stumbled on the one thing this man does not want to talk about, perhaps what he has come here precisely to avoid. It is clear to her that this man, these two men, have undergone some terrible personal trauma. She has seen this before, the taut-eyed expression of despair, felt the atmosphere of silent, gagged tension: it will mean a breach, a loss, an inconsolable termination of some sort. Something has happened, something has ended, something has been wrenched from them. Rosalind sees this. Something has derailed these two men and here they are, as she is, in the Bolivian Altiplano.

  ‘I’m not … I’m …’ The man is trying again, his hands holding the pages of the guidebook are trembling, with grief or illness or both, Rosalind doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know.

  ‘You’re taking a break,’ she finishes for him quietly, before turning back to the window, signalling that she will press him no further, that the conversation may cease, if he so wishes.

  And he does wish. For the next hour or so, the only sound is that of the wind rushing past the windows and the tip-tip-a-tap of the seismograph vibrating as the truck navigates rougher and rougher ground.

  The problem was, Rosalind thinks, as they speed into desert – an ochre place of streaked sand and strange, wind-blown rock formations – that Lionel had been so appallingly unapologetic. He thought, or seemed to think, that having a son he’d kept from her for twenty years was not something that necessitated any kind of excuse or regret. Worse, he seemed to think it was none of her business. When she’d confronted him with the bills and invoices he’d sat for a moment at his desk, his head lowered, buried in his hands, and she’d thought he was grappling with feelings of guilt and remorse so strong that he couldn’t meet her eye. She, his wife, who had stood by him, who had remained at his side, for three decades in this country, who had supported and aided and eased his career at every turn, lunching and dining and entertaining God knows which dignitary or politician he would turn up next, ensuring he had a pressed silk square in his breast pocket every single morning, slotting a boutonnière into his jacket, fitting a hat to his balding crown before he headed out into the sweltering city. But when he raised his head, his expression hadn’t been as she’d expected – ashamed or furtive or even placatory. On the contrary, he’d looked irritated and weary, as if she was bothering him with some trifling matter, or as if she had taken it upon herself to meddle in something that shouldn’t concern her.

  He had taken off his glasses and pinched the skin of his nose and rubbed at his forehead, all the while telling her about how he’d started ‘seeing’ – as if it was just a matter of eyes, of vision, something that involved the engagement of a single sense – a woman a long time ago, while she, Rosalind, had spent those months back in England.

  He made it sound, she thinks now, as she sits in the truck, as she feels every knock and bump and rock in the road travel up through the wheels and axles and suspension of the truck into the scantily padded seat and up into her spine, as if it had been a holiday. As if she was lounging about, living it up there in
England for that year, reading magazines and seeing friends, when in fact she had been helping her sister with the early arrival of her second set of twins.

  So while she was teaching the older children to sit on the potty or helping bathe the tiny babies or pegging out endless laundry or getting up in the night to prepare bottles or negotiating with the health visitor for extra orange juice or mopping up her sister’s copious tears, her own husband was at home in their Santiago house ‘seeing’ another woman.

  Rosalind has no idea what this ‘seeing’ entails. She has vague images of evenings spent in restaurants or nightclubs, dancing in half-light to a swing band, clandestine meetings in hotel rooms, glasses of wine, presents, perhaps, from that jeweller’s with the green leather boxes.

  The woman, he’d said, was no one she knew. A Toronto journalist, in Santiago for a few months. There had, he’d said, in a monotone, apparently weary of the conversation, been a child. (‘A resulting child’, was his exact phrase, as if the boy was the residue of some chemistry experiment, some kind of statistic, to be recorded on a graph or logged in a column.)

  He had, he’d said, felt he needed to ‘do the right thing by them’ and provide the boy with an education.

  Something had happened then: the phone had rung or one of the servants had come through a door with tea on a tray, to be drunk, post to be opened and read. He had turned away from her to deal with whatever it was, as if that was an end to the matter. So Rosalind had walked away, through the rooms and corridors of their house, and she had been thinking of all the questions she hadn’t put to him: did he still see the woman, had he loved her, did he see the boy, how often and when, what did he look like, did he look like him, and what about her, Rosalind, his wife of forty-five years, what was she supposed to make of this information, what about doing the right thing by her, and what on earth would that right thing have been?

  She wasn’t thinking of her sister, in the first few weeks of the babies’ lives, how she had sat in her nursing chair with her head in her hands, saying, how will I cope, how will we manage, I can’t do it, Rosie, I just can’t, you take one, please, take both. She hadn’t, of course, even though she would have loved nothing more than to bundle one – or even both – of those little pink babies under her arm and trot off back to South America. She didn’t think about how, when she next visited England, two years later, none of the children had any memory of her, even though she had fed them, changed them, sung to them, lulled them off to sleep, wiped their bottoms, mashed up their first foods. She didn’t think about whether Lionel had had the woman there, whether they had been together in these rooms, whether the servants had known, had known all this time, all these years, whether everyone knew, except her.