by Fiona Shaw
So Will talked on that afternoon, as he hadn’t been able to with anyone else. He described Benjamin for her: what he looked like, how he laughed, what made him angry, how he died. He told her about their perfect day, enough of it at least that she’d understand.
‘He was my closest friend,’ Will said. ‘I don’t know how to …’
He didn’t know whether she understood what he didn’t say. It was never named, not by him and not by her. But she listened, and he felt less alone.
The summer was nearly over and both would soon return to school for a final year. In the last week of the holiday they met every day. She told him her dreams and her plans and the arguments she had with her mother; she made him laugh with her dislike of boats, and horses, and walks, and she told of how she longed for the city.
‘We were going to share a flat in the city, Benjamin and me,’ Will said. ‘And maybe go to India.’ Live unsuitably, he thought, God knows I wanted to do that.
‘What did your parents think?’
‘My father is relieved now, though he can’t say that, can’t speak ill. But he didn’t like Benjamin. Too clever. “That Jewish boy”, he called him once. And he didn’t trust us together. We might have done anything.’
Once they took the bus into town and saw a film and on the way back she took his hand and stroked its puckered palm. They kissed too, not quite chaste, not quite not.
He didn’t know what he felt; hunger for another human body, affection, perhaps even desire. He didn’t know what was assumed between them; wasn’t sure for himself.
‘We’ll write?’ he said.
‘Perhaps.’
When he returned to school, Will buried himself deep as he could. For a few days there was a flurry of excitement, a quizzing curiosity, about Benjamin’s death. But once that died down, he was left alone with his grief and his puzzlement. He had meant it as a joke, when he first invited Barbara for tea, an angry unspoken joke with his mother, but his sister had been right and they were chums now. More than. He wrote to Barbara, long letters full of observations and a curiosity that was partly willed and partly real. He talked of his ambitions and his intentions; he spoke of his desire to see her again, and he made little mention of Benjamin. Sometimes she didn’t reply and sometimes she did: short letters that shifted between impersonal affection, as though copied direct from some template, and bewilderment. What were they to each other? More than friends and less than lovers, like their kiss.
It was winter, nearly Christmas, and the bedroom was cold and the day still dark outside. Will heard his father’s heavy steps on the stairs, the slam of the bathroom door, the crunch of the key in the lock. Beneath the covers, he was warm, his body weightless. He ran his fingers over his ribs, feeling the tight, smooth surface of the scar, the ‘not there’ touch that still disturbed him, where the nerves had been burnt off.
‘I feel queasy,’ he said. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen her since the summer.’
He kept his voice low; Emma had already asked him who he talked to in his bedroom and he told her she shouldn’t be listening, and he made a monster face at her, but he spoke to Benjamin very quietly after that.
‘I miss you. I wake up and I miss you,’ he said.
Out of bed, he switched on the bar heater and stood shivering, thinking, before its building heat.
‘She knows about you. You and me. I’m sure she does. I didn’t tell her that, not directly, but she knows it. So if she still wants to see me?’
Then he gathered himself together and dressed and went downstairs.
In the kitchen his mother was rolling pastry. The air was warm and sweet-smelling. She looked up.
‘How’s the Pobble?’ she said.
‘I can feel them today. Where’s Father?’
‘Gone for the Sunday papers,’ she said. ‘It’s today, isn’t it? That you’re seeing Barbara?’
‘First time since September.’
‘Because I’d like to say something now, before George is back.’
Will waited. She punched out some more pastry disks, gathered the tatters into a ball, and came and sat down opposite.
‘I’ll be blunt,’ she said.
Will looked at her hands, noticed how the flour picked out the hairs along her fingers. She rapped her fingers on the table, making a little flour cloud.
‘Don’t do something you’ll regret,’ she said.
‘I’ve done that already.’ The words came out before he could think. And when his mother raised her eyes in a question he added: ‘I did that on a day in July.’
‘Ah …’ she said, and he held his breath and wondered whether he had said too much. Because for all that she had liked Benjamin, and was horrified by his death, and had grieved for her son grieving, he was sure she’d have no tolerance for their love.
‘I’m sorry, Mother. Tell me what I’d regret,’ he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his tongue.
‘Barbara seems like a lovely girl, and nothing would make me happier. But don’t marry too quickly. Don’t marry because you think you ought. That’s what you’d regret.’
He breathed out. He had still supposed, he didn’t know why, that she was going to say something about Benjamin, perhaps because it was so much in his mind. But for her to talk of marriage was absurd.
‘Mother, I’m home from school. Two terms yet before I leave, even. Then I’m going to university.’
‘Still, don’t,’ she said.
‘We’re going for a walk. Nothing more.’
She handed him a wooden spoon and pointed to the mixing bowl. ‘Stir, and wish. I’ve waited for you.’
He turned the heavy mixture over and over, catching the glint of the sixpence once, smelling the sweet cinnamon and the nutmeg must, and closed his eyes and wished.
‘It can be lonely in a marriage, too. And she is not to toy with,’ Meg said.
‘I like her. That’s all.’
‘You barely know her. And you’re still grieving. I’m glad something good, or someone, has come out of all this. But don’t use her, Will.’
‘There are boys at school who talk of marriage,’ he said.
‘Don’t talk to me of boys,’ his mother said, and her sharp tone surprised him. ‘They’re no more than that. Just boys.’
He walked with Barbara along the winter lanes, keeping away from the sea, and they held hands, glove to glove. And talked, carefully, wonderingly, because there seemed to be so much at stake, so fast.
‘You never speak of Benjamin now,’ she said.
He swiped a stick at the high hawthorn hedge, sent down a shower of drops.
‘I don’t know how to,’ he said. ‘Though I had a disagreement with my mother just this morning, as a matter of fact.’
He knew he didn’t love this girl as he had loved that boy. He had no wish to consume her, to ravish or command her. He didn’t long for her fingers on his skin, didn’t long to kiss her. She was the price of his guilt, she was his retribution. He had a love and he let him die; he must pay now and love against his nature. Yet he hadn’t lied when he spoke to his mother. He liked Barbara, maybe more than liked her. And she was his defence against grief.
It was New Year’s Eve when giggling and a little drunk, they ran away from the party before midnight, climbing from the cloakroom window. It was cold and clear, that last night of the old year. Will stood on the frosted grass, leaned his head back and yelled up to the sky.
‘Benjamin! I salute you. Watch over me, Ben!’
Then he took Barbara’s hand and they slewed their way by moonlight down the lanes towards the water.
‘You don’t like the sea, and I don’t like it either, any more,’ Will said. ‘But we won’t go there, and we won’t go on the path. We’ll just go to the shed.’
‘What shed?’ Barbara said. ‘There isn’t a shed.’
‘I wanted to live there when I was younger. My Huckleberry Finn shed.’
The land was sold now and the boats were gone, but the
shed remained. A nail still kept the hasp in place, and when they opened the door, they found it still full of gear.
‘Will?’ Barbara’s voice was anxious. ‘Are you sure?’
But he was. It was just where he wanted to be, and he took her hand and pulled her in.
‘There are rugs and a groundsheet in here somewhere,’ he said. ‘No electric now, but there are candles too, don’t ask me why.’
He held his lighter up in the dark, the whoozy flame making things jump, till they found the candles. Then spread the groundsheet, and the rugs over. Will felt more sober, and he took a swig from the bottle they’d brought with them. He looked at Barbara. She had taken off her shoes when they left the road – ‘I’ll kill myself in those heels’ – wincing her way over the cold ground in her stockinged feet. Now she sat in the middle of the rug and took off the stockings, unfastening the clips from her garter belt.
‘Don’t watch,’ she said, her voice still a little drunk.
Her hair, piled high for the party, was beginning to tumble.
‘Looks like seaweed,’ Will said, lifting it and letting it drop.
When she was done with the stockings, she wrapped her arms around herself.
‘We should climb under,’ he said. ‘Stay warm.’
Barbara’s brown eyes seemed black in the candlelight, and as she moved, her body moved in and out of the shadows.
Awkwardly they held one another, and kissed, gently at first and then harder. Will kissed her girl’s face and shut his eyes.
He would have come here with Ben, he would have wrapped him up in these rugs and surrounded him with candles.
Will pressed himself against her softer body and he felt her fingers on his belt, under his shirt, on his fly, daring to touch him, daring him.
He would have kissed Benjamin, hard on the lips, in the mouth; would have kissed his nipples, would have bitten his ear, his neck.
He ran his hand down her skirt, down to the hem. He stroked her legs.
He said: ‘I’m a stranger here. If you can help.’
AIR
On the ceiling, the little yellow stars glowed brighter. He’d get drunk tonight, and tomorrow he would bury his father. Will let his head sink into the cool pillow. It was half way to dark in here and if he wasn’t careful, he would fall asleep. He glanced about, and from round the edges of the room Cassie’s toys and piles of stuff seemed to watch him back: pop stars stared from magazines and dolls made glassy eyes at him. It smelt different in here to the rest of the flat, fresher, less used, and he felt his old familiar ache.
Will wondered what his father had known in that final, reduced month of his life. Last week he had sat by his bed on the plastic hospital chair and seen how little space his father took up now – just a crumpled shape beneath the sheets – and he’d held his father’s hand. It wasn’t such an old hand, because his father wasn’t such an old man. But it had been heavy, and so still, not the faintest twitch of a finger, as if it were no longer inhabited. He’d looked at the veins like raised roots, the liver spots, the filigree of grey hairs that ran down each finger. And he’d noticed that the fingernails were getting long, and hunted for clippers in the bedside cupboard, because his father always kept them neat. Finding none, he’d slipped his father’s hands beneath the covers.
He’d barely spoken to his father; they’d never talked much and it didn’t occur to him to begin now, when George was dying. But curious, he had touched his cheek. It felt soft and yielding, as if it had given itself up to its own ghost. He’d never touched his father’s face before. As he got up to leave, he’d noticed his father’s watch, made safe and silent. Picking it up, he’d wound it and set the hands right, and strapped it gently onto his father’s wrist. Then he’d bent over the bed and kissed his brow.
‘Always a first time,’ he’d said.
A strand of cobweb drifted to and fro in Cassie’s window, and his thoughts drifted with it. He thought how hard it was, being a good father, especially now, now that Cassie was this age, and he fell into remembering, different scenes, different times, and before he could stop himself, the remembering took him somewhere else and he was over the edge, his stomach lurching, head over feet over mind.
They’d made such a good show of it at first. They were a beautiful couple, to themselves most of all. He went to university and Barbara found work in London. They spent time together: parties, films, weekends, trips home occasionally. They had sex. Though that was when it was hardest, when he most needed not to think; and he often wondered what it could be like for her. She seemed to enjoy it and he was always gentle, but really he didn’t know, and he never asked. Asking would have been too risky. You got your fingers burnt for asking. And what about for him? For him, the sex was shadow play, pretending. He never longed for it. He never felt that insatiability, that hunger that he’d known for Ben. But they loved each other, and they made each other laugh; that was good enough.
It was late in the summer he finished university that he took the train to Devon on his own for the weekend. As he walked up from the village, there was a golden, early evening light that made everything look possible. Sitting high up on the gatepost, Emma was waiting for him, her dress pulled in between her legs for decorum. She was brown from a summer outside, and had her hair cut short. With her gangly, teenage shape, she still looked more of a boy than a girl, except for the dress.
‘Mother thinks you’re a bringer of tidings,’ she said.
‘I have a message from Barbara,’ he said, ‘Which is: “Max Factor. Strawberry meringue.” That’s word for word.’
Emma punched the air.
‘She said you’d understand,’ Will said.
She jumped down, brushed off her dress and took his arm, striding to match his steps. Her arm seemed so light in his, and he envied her, standing there, so jaunty, on the edge of growing up.
‘Barbara’s too good for you,’ Emma said.
‘Says who?’
Emma shrugged.
‘They’re right, whoever said it,’ he said.
He found Meg, as ever, in the greenhouse. The air was rich and sweet. He sat, as he always had, in the old wicker chair and watched her swing the watering can. How often had he watched her like this? All his life, that he could remember. He noticed, and this was for the first time, how measured, how slow her movements were, as if this – this tending to all that grew in here – were the only task she had in the world. The water flashed across beds of salad and cucumbers, and pots with tomatoes that shone like jewels. She had seen him, marked his presence with the slightest move of the head, and after a minute she spoke.
‘I know why you’re here,’ she said. ‘And she is a lovely girl.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
She tilted the can and he waited.
‘As long as you’re sure,’ she said at last. ‘As long as you don’t find yourself wishing she was someone else. Something else.’
‘I don’t wish that,’ he said. ‘And I thought the news would make you glad.’
She put down the watering can.
‘I am glad,’ she said. ‘I am.’
But there was something in her voice he didn’t understand. He stood and walked over to her and when she turned, he saw that she was crying.
‘Mother?’ he said.
He felt a little boy again, to find her crying for something that he didn’t know about or understand.
‘Pay no attention,’ she said, and she wiped away her tears. Then: ‘I only worry that you are too like me,’ she said.
‘And that’s a bad thing?’
‘Sometimes one should act in spite of the world and his wife,’ and she smiled and put a hand to his hair, smoothed it with her fingers.
‘But if you’re sure, then I am glad for both of you,’ she said. ‘So go and find your father,’ she said. ‘You’ll make him proud.’
The next years were tumbled in Will’s mind like broken china: fragments with a snatch of colour or a half-design, though the
ir sharp edges were smoother now. A life in London, work, marriage, friends, busyness. Days filled up, kept busy, so there was no time for being sad. It was true that he could still be caught by surprise: by the glance of light off the fountain water in Trafalgar Square, or a stray gull’s cry high above the streets, or the stretch of sky before him as he walked on a city heath. Without thinking, he’d put his fingers to his collar-bone and feel the scar scorched on there. It was a medallion, the measure of something; and he’d go on with a sense of sadness he wouldn’t name, but which he couldn’t, for a while, put away. Once he went with three friends, three other husbands, on a summer trip. They camped beside the River Wye and fished for salmon. The river was gorgeous, and the mood in the group was easy, relaxed. But Will didn’t enjoy it. It brought things too close and it was harder to be himself, sleeping close to the other men, and with the water, and the dying fish, and he turned the offer down when it came again.
The morning Cassie was born, the day was still so new, so early, that it seemed to Will he had the whole world to himself. His baby, his new baby girl, had been born in the small hours and now she filled up his mind’s eye. He’d left her sleeping in her sleeping mother’s arms and come out, euphoric, into a city that was still, incredibly, asleep. Once already he’d crossed the river and not even noticed, running over Westminster Bridge as if he could take flight above the dozy pigeons, above the sleeping boats. He ran and ran and he saw only her dark, wet hair, her perfect ears, her fists like walnuts, her puckered mouth. Past Embankment tube station and up the steps, still running, and on to the grimy stretch of Hungerford Bridge, his spirits exhilarated, boundless.
Still he saw nothing except his baby’s perfect face and he ran on, coat tails flapping, until, halfway across, fatigue struck. His legs turned to lead, his lungs burned in his chest, and he was forced to a halt. Chest heaving, eyes blurred, he walked over to the rail; leaned on it, looked down. The sky was dawning grey, and the river was grey beneath, gagging and churning. Behind him, a train rumbled by. Between the air and the water Will stood and perhaps it was so much space, or it was the running; or perhaps it was hunger, because he hadn’t eaten much in the last twelve hours; or perhaps it was the new life he was responsible for, he didn’t know. But something overwhelmed him – dizziness, vertigo, terror – and he felt himself pulled beyond the edge, pulled into his fear, into the air, till he was reaching over and clinging on, staring down at the dirty Thames, repulsed and longing.