Divided Kingdom

by Rupert Thomson

  I was staring at her again, but for a different reason now. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t understood. ‘Like you,’ I said.

  She put a finger to her lips. ‘You’ll wake everybody in the street.’ But she still had laughter in her eyes. They had sharpened at the corners, and the dark parts shone.

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. ‘Like you.’

  She didn’t seem to hear what I was telling her – or, if she did, she automatically discounted it.

  We came down out of the old town and on to a main road near the station.

  ‘I’m not your brother, Marie,’ I said. ‘We’re not even related – not really.’ I felt I was risking everything in saying this, and yet I couldn’t hold back. But she didn’t take it the way I had expected.

  ‘How much do you remember?’ she said. ‘You know, from before?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  She stopped again and looked at me. ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Only my name.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Matthew Micklewright.’ The words sounded like gobbledegook. I wished I hadn’t said them.

  ‘But you were eight years old. Nearly nine. You must remember something.’

  I shook my head savagely. ‘No. Nothing.’ What I was telling her was true, and for the first time ever I was glad it was true. I had an urgent need to deny her something. I was taking a kind of revenge on her.

  ‘That’s astonishing,’ she said, though she didn’t look astonished. She was staring at the ground as if she had just noticed a bird with a broken wing.

  As we crossed the river I insisted on walking in the gutter, even though I knew people always drove too fast on that particular stretch of road. Once, I looked up to see a pair of headlights hanging in front of me, and Marie had to pull me back on to the pavement.

  ‘You’ll get killed,’ she said.

  ‘What do you care? I don’t mean anything to you.’ It all came out blurred. My tongue seemed to have swollen, filling my mouth.

  Back home, I sprawled on the bathroom floor, the black-and-white tiles constantly swerving away from me but never going anywhere. Everything I thought of made me feel sick. I clutched the lavatory seat with both arms, my cheek resting heavily against my sleeve. Cold air rose out of the bowl. I tried to look round, but the ceiling tilted and I fell sideways against the bath.

  Hauling me upright, Marie placed a hand on my forehead. I had to reach up and push it away. ‘No,’ I mumbled. ‘Leave me alone.’

  The impossible weight of her cool hand.

  The impossible beauty of it.

  On returning from the public library one evening, I opened the front door and called up the stairs as usual, but there was no response, nothing except the patient tick-tick-tick of the boiler and the creak of the bottom step beneath my foot. Outside, the shops had already shut and the street was quiet. It was the summer before I went to university. I would have been eighteen.

  I was standing by the fridge drinking a glass of juice when I became aware of a breathy, repetitive sound coming from behind me. At first I thought a mouse had worked its way into the kitchen wall, but then some instinct sent me hurrying round the corner into the store-room where I found Victor in the shadows by the washing-machine, with his face in his hands. I asked him what was wrong. He shook his head. I reached out and touched his shoulder. His whole body was trembling. I thought of how machinery behaves when it’s about to break down – all that pitching and staggering, all that vibration. Head still bowed, he turned towards me. I took him in my arms and held him. Victor. My father. I felt something cold land on the back of my hand and realised he was crying. Then the words came, heaved out of him like sobs. Jean had died, he told me.

  He stood in my arms until the light began to go.

  His wife had already died once, years before. Now, though, she had died again, and this time she was gone for good. This second death was final, unambiguous, and left no room for hope. Had she suffered? Had somebody cared for her towards the end? Had she wanted to speak to him? He would never know. The gap that had opened up between them would never be closed.

  I remember asking how he had found out. After all, it had been a decade since she had been taken from him. Being an adult, she would have kept her name, but her tracks would have been well covered. And even if he had been able to trace her, the law expressly forbade any contact.

  ‘I felt it,’ he said.

  Waking from a nap, he had somehow known that, at that moment, the woman he had always loved had ceased to breathe. The knowledge reached him with such force that he had jackknifed into an upright position, his heart beating so fast, so loudly, that he imagined he heard footsteps in the street below, a heavy person running.

  I asked him if anything like that had ever happened before.

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  He didn’t think to question the information, though. For him, it had the incontrovertible power of a divine message or an oracle. It couldn’t be verified, neither could it be disproved. Later, I saw that his behaviour had a distinct emotional logic to it. In sensing his wife’s death, he had reclaimed her as his own.

  Not that it was much comfort to him. He locked himself into his room and refused to come out. I would hear him weeping at all hours of the day and night. He wouldn’t eat the meals I prepared for him. He even stopped listening to the radio. And Marie couldn’t help. She had troubles of her own.

  She had moved back into the house on Hope Street only a few days before. While working for a law firm in the capital, she had fallen in love with one of the senior partners, a married man more than twice her age. She became pregnant by him, but subsequently lost the child. Not long afterwards, he embarked on an affair with his new secretary. Marie resigned. One Sunday morning she appeared on the doorstep with a suitcase, her complexion pale, almost soggy, her hair oddly lacklustre. I remember how frail she felt when I hugged her, as if all the spring and verve, all the resilience, had gone out of her. Less than a week later, Victor woke from his afternoon nap and the period of grieving began.

  Marie took a job at the local supermarket – the same shop, ironically, where we had once been mistaken for lovers. She wore a pink-and-white-striped uniform, her name printed on a plastic badge pinned over her left breast, and she dyed her hair a flagrant chestnut-bronze that made her look anaemic. She showed no interest in men – or, if she did, she allowed them to treat her like something off the supermarket shelf: they consumed her, then disposed of her. Once, I walked through the front door after a morning at the library to find a stranger coming down the stairs buttoning his jacket and smiling plumply as though, like a squirrel, he had nuts stored in his cheeks. He muttered a few words as he edged past, his forehead damp all of a sudden. Perhaps he thought I was the husband. Marie appeared above me in the hallway, her dyed hair hiding half her face. She was wearing a bra and pants that didn’t match. And Victor in his bedroom the whole time, behind that locked door of his, oblivious …

  Usually, when I came home, Marie would be sprawled in front of the TV. She wouldn’t acknowledge me at all, not even a hello. Every now and then, she would imitate the sound a cash-till makes when it scans a bar-code, that monotonous beep, then she would direct a sickly grin at the sofa or the wall, but that was the most anyone got out of her. Everything about our lives was askew, off kilter. We were all adrift in that small house, with no notion of how to steer a course.

  I remember going into her room one evening to tell her that supper was ready. She was lying on her bed, one arm behind her head, a neat round bone showing on the inside of her elbow. Her uniform had ridden up so I could see her bare legs, right up to where her knickers started. I knelt by the bed and put a hand on her thigh, my heart beating so hard that a black mark pulsed in the air between us.

  She watched me for a moment across her breasts, her eyes unlit, her breathing audible, almost abrasive, then she sat up fast and pushed me in the chest with the heel of her hand. I fell backward
s, hitting my head on her cupboard door. She left the bed and walked past me, out of the room. I heard her footsteps, slow and deliberate, as she made her way downstairs, and then the pinched hiss as she turned the TV on.

  In October, I travelled north to take my place at university. There was a part of me that worried about how Victor and Marie would cope in my absence. At the same time, I couldn’t deny the feeling of relief that came over me as I walked out of the house. Grief ran down its walls like condensation, and the silence that lay in all the rooms had become so profound, so treacherous, that I feared I might sink into it, as one might sink into a marsh, never to be seen again. During the previous few weeks I had been aware that either Victor or Marie – or even, possibly, both of them – could be removed from the Red Quarter at any moment. In retrospect, it seems astonishing that they were not. We were just lucky, I suppose. Still, I was always waiting for that unfamiliar and yet predictable knock on the front door. As for Victor and Marie, I doubt they would have cared. Though they had followed different paths, they had both reached a state of mind where they didn’t believe that things could get any worse.

  When I returned to Hope Street for the Christmas holidays, the house seemed poky and ramshackle, but perhaps it suffered by comparison with the university I now attended, a typically sanguine confection of marble, steel and glass. Victor had celebrated his sixty-second birthday in November, and he had decided to take early retirement. Though he no longer locked himself behind his bedroom door, he rarely left the premises, preferring to drift from room to room in his frayed silk dressing-gown, his feet in a pair of leather slippers, the backs of which were trodden flat. The bones showed in his forearms, and his neck had withered to such an extent that I didn’t understand how it could support that enormous imposing head of his. His thoughts seemed firmly rooted in the past, as if compensating for the degree to which he had aged. The book of shoes was never far away.

  Like Victor, Marie had undergone a physical transformation. She had dyed her hair black again, and it curved beneath her chin in the old way, but she was more restrained than she used to be, almost as though she had been stricken by a fever that had left her permanently depleted. She didn’t appear to have any desires or ambitions. Instead, she seemed content simply to stay at home and keep her father company. She was working at the town hall, as a clerk. She was still so young, only twenty-seven. Did she miss that wealthy lawyer? Was she in mourning for the child she had lost? I had no sense of what she might be thinking or feeling. If anything, the months that had elapsed since we had last seen each other had added to our awkwardness, and I found it difficult to know what to say to her. Everything I thought of was either too weighty or too superficial. I knew that we would never again swing hand in hand through the shopping precinct or fall about laughing at the supermarket check-out. The electricity that had crackled in the air between us, the flirtation that had meant so much to me, the love that had lit up my entire life – it was gone, all gone, and it would not return. Night after night, in my small box of a room, I would lie on my back with my arms folded across my chest and I would listen to the wind picking at a loose flap of tar-paper on the roof where she used to sunbathe. Tears would rise to the surface of my eyes and overflow. My cheeks would sting. A spring had welled up inside me, its waters irrepressible, but bitter, acidic.

  In April I went home again, but only for a week this time. On the last night, as we ate our supper at the kitchen table, Victor announced that they were thinking of selling the house. The atmosphere in the room seemed to solidify around me. I couldn’t even lift my knife and fork.

  ‘You wouldn’t mind, would you?’ Victor said.

  ‘Mind?’ I cleared my throat. ‘Why do you want to sell the house?’

  Victor looked away across the room. ‘Too many memories.’

  Though Marie didn’t lift her eyes from her plate, something came through the air from her. She was silently agreeing with her father. Yes, too many memories.

  I pushed my chair back and walked to the window.

  My memories too, I thought. My only memories. I remembered how I had stood on the doorstep, eight years old, how I had crouched deep inside myself and peered out, like someone hiding in a hollow tree-trunk. And Jones’s words had floated into my head, unwelcome but persistent. What if I don’t like them? What if they’re cruel to me? I remembered my stomach lurching, and the sweat on my palms. The Parrys didn’t realise. Or they’d forgotten.

  I thought of the life I’d had before, what there was of it. The holding station with its draughty haunted corridors. Rooms possessed of such a chill that your hair turned cold as a corpse’s. No sooner had you made a friend than he was taken from you. Then your name was taken from you. And before that? A time that was too painful to contemplate or even remember. A time so precious that it was inaccessible. Yes, they must have forgotten, the Parrys. Or perhaps they’d never bothered to imagine. That what they’d given me was all I had.

  A creak came from behind me as someone shifted in a chair.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ Victor said.

  That summer the house was duly sold, and Victor bought a cottage on the south coast with the proceeds. Marie would live there with him. On the day of the move he stalked from one room to another with a claw-hammer, nailing down the lids on tea-chests. Bang-bang-bang, bang-bang-bang. There seemed to be more space between his features, and flecks of white froth showed at the corners of his mouth. His shoulders and elbows jiggled, as though light electric shocks were being constantly administered to all his joints. He had so many things he wanted to do, he told me, once they were settled by the sea. He would grow broad beans, study astronomy, walk three miles every day, keep bees, collect driftwood … He wouldn’t stop talking. I remember turning to Marie. She was standing beside a packing-case, absent-mindedly fingering the tiny chunks of polystyrene. Her face was slightly lowered, and in shadow.

  ‘And what will you do, Marie?’ I asked.

  Her lips tilted almost imperceptibly, a strange little quarter-smile. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All that.’

  That afternoon we drove down to the cottage in Victor’s four-door saloon. It was my holiday, and I had offered to help with the unpacking. It would be my first glimpse of the property. As we came within a mile of the coast, Victor pulled on to the grass verge and announced that he wanted to walk the rest of the way. I said I’d join him. Taking his place behind the wheel, Marie drove on.

  We set out across a wide, rising flank of downland, Victor and I, the sky towering above us, the air buttery with gorse. Before too long we found ourselves on a path made of chalk and, after walking briskly for about twenty minutes, the property came into view, the white of its walls and the black of its front door standing out against the cliff-top’s carpeting of green. The slate roof had the dull sheen of a pigeon’s wing, grey with just a hint of rose. To the east, behind the cottage, the cliffs lifted in a steep but languorous curve, while to the west they fell away, affording panoramic vistas both along the coast and out to sea. There were no trees, no bushes, just acres and acres of grass, with the odd patch of white where it had worn away. No one could deny the uniqueness of the location, and yet, at the same time, I had never seen a place that offered itself to the elements with quite such abandon.

  ‘Imagine what the sunsets are going to be like,’ Victor said.

  But the true precariousness of the situation only struck me when I walked round to the south side of the cottage, where Marie was slumped in a deckchair with her eyes closed, sunning herself. The distance from the back door to the cliff-edge couldn’t have been more than fifty yards. Erosion had always presented a serious problem for that particular stretch of coast. The average annual rate was two or three feet, but once or twice in living memory there had been a winter of storms when more than seven feet had been sacrificed. All year round, the sea nudged and prodded at the base of the cliffs, and great slabs of chalk were jarred loose, crashing to the beach below. There was so much chalk in the wa
ter, in fact, that the waves close to the shore appeared to be made of onyx. The local authorities had drawn a line on the map to indicate the land they were prepared to defend, but the line never came within half a mile of the coast, not unless a town was involved. From an administrative point of view, then, the cottage had already ceased to exist. Victor didn’t care about any of that – and nor, it seemed, did Marie, though it was she who would eventually be left homeless. Victor had lost faith in the whole notion of investment, and as for security he would almost certainly have argued that there was no such thing. Live in the present had become his new mantra. Live for today.

  ‘You worry too much,’ he told me. ‘We’ve got twenty years, and that’s looking on the gloomy side.’

  ‘I can see that I’ll be visiting less frequently as time goes on,’ I said.

  He didn’t smile, though, or even seem to understand.

  During the next few weeks Victor would often ring me up at university to talk about the air quality, the colour of the sky, the peace and quiet.

  ‘Things are better down here,’ he said in one of our first phone-calls. ‘Things are simpler. I feel as if I’ve been given a new lease of life.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘How’s the back garden?’

  This time he got the joke. ‘There’s still a few feet left. You should come down.’

  I said I had a dissertation to complete, which was only half-true. He told me he understood. He approved of my conscientiousness – he saw himself in me, perhaps – and he was proud of my scholastic achievements. If I put my mind to it, he said, there were no heights to which I could not rise. I remembered him calling my name on that deserted railway line when I was eleven, and I heard, once again, the worry in his voice, the love. How I wished I didn’t have to lie to him.

  He rang me again towards Christmas of that year and told me they had just experienced the most extraordinary storm. He’d never seen anything like it. Thunder and lightning all night long, ninety-mile-an-hour winds. A sound that was monotonous and deafening, yet curiously strained, he said, like a car being driven too fast in third gear. The rain had fallen horizontally, which made him feel the world had tilted.