by Jeff Gulvin
They had been together as lovers for almost a year after meeting in Hammersmith. But then he had broken it off. He could not tell himself why, or perhaps he would not. Something about the past, maybe—about Jane, her memory and the pain that still dripped through him when he considered it. Pain in Sarah’s eyes when he told her, five years ago now, before this investigation had even started. He had coupled telling her with his posting to Lothian, just about as far away as he could go; cold, clinical words and then nothing.
He had moved back to London with the Watchman investigation after the Highbury killing. McCague was running the Serious Crimes Unit and an incident room was set up at Loughborough Street. He had been there ever since. It was there that he met her again. He had not known she was in the area, let alone working out of the station. But when McCague asked him to take over the investigation, Sarah was one of those on the team. The irony of it all still stayed with him. For a while she had been cool and distant, but as the investigation lengthened and the team began to knit more closely together, her distance gradually diminished. Her proximity to him was suddenly intoxicating. He tried to avoid the past, was careful about the way he looked at her, mindful of how much he must have hurt her. And she kept her thoughts to herself. But he could feel her eyes on him. He could smell her when she was close to him. She still moved him. Then one day she came to him.
It was his day off. He stepped out of the shower and was towelling his hair when the doorbell sounded. Moving into the hall he tightened the cord of his dressing gown and made out a diminutive shape through the striped glass of the front door. For a moment he hesitated, then paced along the hall and quietly closed the door to his study.
He opened the front door and she stood there looking at him. Rain spattered the fawn shoulders of her coat.
‘Sarah.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course you can.’
Stepping aside he let her into the hall and closed the door. She stood there. He could feel her uncertainty.
‘It’s cold in here.’
He stepped past her, his robed side brushing against her. ‘I’ve only been up long enough to get in the shower,’ he said. ‘I’ll put the heating on.’
She sat on the settee, her coat still shrouding her as he turned up the dial of the thermostat. From the kitchen he brought them a pot of coffee and poured out a cup for her.
‘Thank you,’ she said as she took it from him. Vanner pushed his fingers through damp hair and sat down opposite her.
‘I wanted to see you.’ When she said it it was in a small voice.
Vanner felt blood at his temples. He had feared this—for how long he did not know, but he had feared it. She was looking at him now, upturned eyes under darkly arcing brows; her jet black hair cut shoulder-length to bob about her jawline. It was heavy and shining with the film of moisture that still lingered from the breath of the rain. Big eyes, round eyes, darkly flashing eyes. Vanner shifted uneasily in his seat, unsure of himself all at once in the vulnerability of his bathrobe.
‘I don’t know what to say, Sarah.’
‘I know that. You never did.’
He got up out of the seat and walked to the window, the breath rising in his chest. Rain obscured his view, plastering the glass with ribbons of water as if deliberately seeking to pen him back in the room. He could see her in the glass, demure all at once in the chair. On the street she was so tough, dealing with the gibes and the barbs from lame-hearted males who flexed their manhood verbally with one comment after another.
Vanner took a breath and turned to face her. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ he said quietly. ‘I never meant to hurt you.’
‘It was hard for me to come here, Aden.’
He nodded.
She looked away. ‘I wanted you. I still do.’
Vanner parted his lips a fraction. ‘I wanted you too,’ he said.
A light in her eyes. He lifted a hand, palm flattened as if to fan it out.
‘But?’ she said.
‘I’ve nothing to offer, Sarah.’
‘That’s what you said when you went to Scotland.’
‘That’s because it was true.’
‘And now?’
‘It’s still true.’
‘But why?’
He bit down on his teeth, outlining the hardness of his jaw through his cheek.
‘What we had seemed so special.’
‘No.’ He said it quickly, sharply, almost with venom. He saw her flinch. ‘You don’t know me.’ A vain effort to soften the blow. ‘I have no love. There is no love with me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said helplessly.
Pain. The past. The night. His breathing grew deeper and he had to turn back to the window again. The tension gripped his muscles so his whole body was taut with it. Fingers buckled in fists, the sinew of arm and shoulder punching out at the world through tight and knotted skin. He scowled into the glass. Sarah sat where she was and then she stood up, slowly, with great effort. She smoothed her still fastened coat with her palms. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
He watched her leave the room, her reflection opaque in the glass. He heard her in the hall, the breath of wind as the front door was opened. The click loud against his skin as it was closed again. For a while he remained where he was, then he went through to the hall and opened the door to his study. From the window, he watched her cross the road, morning rain beating at her. She got into her car and drove away.
Standing there, gazing unsighted over the street, he clutched his cup to his chest. The room was cold: he could see his breath on the window. Quietly he turned, walked over to the desk and sat down. Pictures on the wall in front of him. The shelves rose to his left. Papers, folders, stacked neatly side by side. From the top shelf he lifted down a framed photograph, and stared at the vague figure in uniform. Replacing it, he studied the array of paper folders. Taking one from the second shelf he moved aside the typewriter, and laid it out in front of him. Again he gazed at the pictures, placed on the wall at eye level. Then he opened the file and slowly leafed through the pages.
Vanner shook away memory as absently he fed more wood to the fire and then sat back again with his whiskey. He took a cigarette from the packet on the mantelpiece and lit it from a stick in the hearth. He hunched himself forward on his seat now, hands cupping the warmth of the glass, smoke from the cigarette curling upward in a fine eddy between his fingers. Love. He stared into the fire. Wood blistered. He had loved Jane. They had been married within a year of that first night in her father’s quarters. Yes, that had been love. He remembered recalling the emotion at the time when first he realised that this girl, this woman, with her warmth, her laughter, awoke something inside him that he could not quantify. The inexplicability of love. His father’s face, mumbled words to him as a teenager. I’ve met someone. Now he, Aden Vanner, had met someone.
They were married the weekend after he graduated from Sandhurst. A full military ceremony. His father married them, and for the first time in his life, Vanner was pleased he was a priest. They honeymooned in Corsica, and as they lay on the beach at Calvi, he watched the sea manoeuvres of the Foreign Legion through binoculars. He remembered leaning back on his elbows and staring at her where she lay face down, her back so slim and arched and gathered at the waist. The swelling of her calves and the firm line of her thighs. Again he looked out at the would-be legionnaires in the bay and he felt that his life was complete.
Ulster. Much later, back in Ulster only this time as an officer. Jane remained in England, in army quarters, which she said now that she had always hated. She wanted a house of their own but he did not earn enough money yet and he refused to take any from her father. So she stayed in quarters while he was on a tour of the province. Bitterly he was to regret that: how swollen and empty his pride had been with hindsight. He used to think about her at night, on patrol in darkened streets with rain dripping from the lip of his helmet. Scraping boots, the da
mp smell of soldiers, the raucous singing from the pubs on Falls Road as Friday night moved into Saturday morning.
Crossmaglen, the bandit country; lying flat on his belly with his men about him, as the wind whispered among the naked branches of trees dulled to nothing by winter. He thought about her then. He thought about what he would say in his letters to her. He longed for the warmth of the barracks and the solitude of his room where he could smell her letters and peruse their words at his leisure.
His eagerness to go home amazed him. Never before had any outside influence had such an effect on him. He delighted in her company, her spirit, her body; warming himself in her. Again she talked of leaving base quarters; of a home of their own, somewhere in the country, somewhere private where she could walk naked in her garden if she wanted to. Again he did not listen. Again he would hear nothing of money from her family. Again he was a fool.
He had been a Captain for a year when the Falklands War summoned him to the South Atlantic. Goose Green, where Jones got killed. That was real war, with the enemy visible in front of you instead of behind you and above you and breathing darkly amid the shadows of Belfast streets. He was gone a long time and when he came home he was different.
That final month when they made love for the last time, how she moved with him, moaning; her fingers in his back, in his neck; her lips to his ear, breath like vapour against his cheek. Words whispered silently. He could not begin to understand where it went wrong. Looking back over time he could not see at what moment love faltered, where doubt crept in and with it silence. Back in Belfast again, disturbed, within himself. He had not been there three weeks when she wrote and told him there was someone else. He obtained a special dispensationary leave and returned home.
All the way back in the plane, her words from the letter echoed in his head like a bell tolling.
You’re different, Aden. You’ve changed. You’re not the man that I married. But then maybe you are and that’s what frightens me the most. Frightens her. He frightened her.
Maybe he had changed, quieter, more distant. Goose Green, and an Argentinian soldier, squirming and crying beneath him as he gouged him to death with a bayonet. Blood up the blade and muscle and tissue and bubbles of blood on his lips as his lungs finally burst and the sudden slackness of bent fingers about the shaft of the rifle. He had told her. He had had to tell her. Afterwards she was silent.
‘Who is he?’
She looks at him, mouth working, a tick edging a wrinkle into the smooth skin of her cheek.
‘Who is he?’
‘It’s Andrew, Aden.’
The pain, like a hot knife under the ribs. Andrew Riley, his best man, a friend from way back in school. Betrayal.
‘Is he better than me?’
She looks away, shaking off tears. ‘I haven’t slept with him.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Words falling from his mouth, a voice unlike his own.
‘He’s been a friend to me, Aden. That’s all. He hasn’t laid a finger on me. But he loves me. When you weren’t there he was. You were never there. All the Army was there, always around me, but you were never there.’ Real pain in her voice. Real tears brimming to fall and burn her cheeks. ‘I told you to let us move off the base but your pride wouldn’t allow it.’
He takes a pace towards her. ‘It’s more than that. Don’t you tell me it’s just that.’
For a moment they look at one another, him standing, her sitting and the fear all at once in her eyes.
‘You said in the letter I frighten you. How on earth can I frighten you?’
‘You do, Aden.’ Shaking her head, hands knotted together, as if she cannot find the words. ‘You kill people.’
‘I’m a soldier. For Christ’s sake—your father’s a soldier.’
‘Not like you. He’s kind and gentle and he sits behind a desk with his tie on. He’s not like you, Aden. He doesn’t kill people. He doesn’t keep going back to Belfast for more and more and more.’
And now he is silent, gaze pinned to the floor.
‘Are you moving in with him?’
‘No.’
‘Where then?’ Desperate words.
‘London.’
‘Money from your father?’
‘Yes.’ She stares at him, the hurt and yet the determination livid in her eyes. ‘Money you wouldn’t accept. Money I can accept.’
‘Do you love him?’ His hands open, all but wrung out before him.
‘He says he loves me.’
‘And do you love him?’
‘I think I do.’
Vanner standing, shifting the weight from one lost foot to the other, the pain in his gut tearing at him, blinding him in his impotence.
‘Are you leaving now?’
‘Tonight, yes.’
‘Will I know where you are?’
‘No.’
He stands, arms stiff like boards at his sides. He looks in her eyes, away from her eyes and back again. His mouth opens, desperate, eyes roaming her face, legs, belly. ‘We made love. Last month. I hoped …’
She closes her eyes so that they buckle into frenzied wrinkles of flesh. ‘I had my period.’
And the pain grips as the blood falls and with the falling of blood the end. Sweat in his eyes. He is blinking back tears, jaw stiff and frayed. She rises and lifts her case from the hall. In his mind all he sees is a stain of red on a sheet and the lifetime of silence that follows.
The sound of tyres on gravel pulled him away from the memory and he stood up. Laying aside his glass, he fed the fire and waited for the ringing of the doorbell. He could hear her on the drive as she walked up to the door, quick steps. The wind battled with the window pane. Vanner moved into the hall and waited until she rang the bell before he opened it. Sarah stood there with her coat flapping away from her and her hair flying about her face.
‘Come in,’ he said.
She went straight through to the lounge without speaking to him. Following her he closed the door. She was standing, half-bending, warming her hands by the fire. ‘McCague got Daniels to drop his complaint against you,’ she said.
Vanner stood where he was. ‘Has he? Good old McCague.’ He thought for a moment. ‘What about CIB?’
She half-smiled. ‘Not happy.’
‘Are they going to send the file up regardless?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘But McCague’s hoping to keep it internal.’
She nodded.
‘And I’m still suspended?’
‘Yes.’
Vanner placed a log on the fire. ‘I bet Morrison’s fuming.’
‘Well, he’s not exactly singing about it.’
He looked at her. ‘You drove all this way just to tell me?’
She stripped off her coat and laid it across the chair. She stood, legs slightly apart, black skirt, black stockings. For a long time they looked at one another. Once more Vanner felt the ache of his loss in his gut. Still Sarah stared impassively back at him. He could taste the whiskey and cigarettes on his own breath. He could not take his eyes off her. ‘I want you,’ he said quietly.
Sarah looked coldly at him for a few moments. ‘Why?’
He could not answer. The moment died in him. Was he speaking to her or to the past? He turned away. ‘I’ll get you a drink,’ he muttered.
‘No. Answer me. Why do you want me?’
He faltered, looked at her once more. ‘Because you want me, Sarah.’
‘How do you know?’
He took a step forward, power suddenly intoxicating. ‘Because you’re here.’ He took another pace. ‘I can feel it in you. I can smell it.’
‘You’re wrong.’
He was almost up to her. He smiled now. ‘I don’t believe you.’
She closed her eyes. Vanner stood over her. Taking her by the shoulders he half-lifted her, pulling her head round to his. She looked up at him then and her eyes flashed.
‘You can give me nothing,’ she said.
He bu
ried his face into hers, mouth into mouth, flesh into flesh, working himself against her. For a moment they kissed and then broke.
Vanner sat on the arm of the chair. ‘Undress.’
She stared at him. ‘What?’
‘Undress.’ He could feel his tongue swelling against the inside of his mouth. ‘Undress,’ he said again.
‘No.’
‘Do it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I want you to.’
She seemed to sneer at him then slowly she began to unbutton her blouse. Vanner hooded his eyes. Smoke danced from the fire, flames tracing lines against the chimney. The warmth of the room seeped through him, like hot water on world-weary skin. Sarah slipped out of her blouse, the crispness of the cotton rustling over the sudden gooseflesh that lifted the skin of her arms. Her neck glowed with the red of the fire and her breasts seemed to swell against the darkened silk of her underwear. Half-bending, she worked the skirt down over her thighs, cream above the black of her stocking tops. As her slip fell away so her breasts rose; the nipples, twists of flesh taut now under his gaze. And then she was naked before him and lifting him out of the chair.
They lay together, her head on his chest; the fire a murmur in the grate. Her fingers traced patterns across his belly. He closed his eyes and the room moved with the heat of the ashes. He could hear rain, lighter now, all but spent against the glass. The wind seemed to have lost its way in the dark. He had no concept of time—day, night, day. The clock above the fireplace ticked on, but not with time.
Sarah’s hand stopped moving: he felt her sigh, sudden and heavy against his side.
‘I hate you,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘We have no relationship.’
‘I know.’
‘Nothing other than this.’
‘I know that too.’
‘You don’t want any more?’ She had lifted her head. Moving onto her stomach she gazed at him. Vanner looked back at her out of the bottom of his eyes. He said nothing.