by Various
Christopher’s West Hampstead flat was so transformed by her visits that he could hardly recognise his old convenient refuge, and was uneasy spending time in there without her, preferring to drive back at night even when it was late to the anonymous box of a place he rented near his factory, in Gloucestershire. Certain indelible images seemed to be projected like home movies against that London flat’s white walls: which were too vacantly receptive because he’d never got round to decorating and hanging up pictures as he ought to. Sally said she loved his flat, the emptiness of it, the unfilled blank spaces – they made her feel free. All the surfaces in her own life, she said, were written over and over in all directions, like an old letter.
The thing had begun on one afternoon of drama when Christopher had arrived for a visit at Frank and Sally’s house outside Southwold on a hot Sunday in summer. It was a lovely old crumbling low stone farmhouse with deep-set windows, smothered on the side facing the road in a silver-limbed hoary ancient rambler whose roses burned intensely red in the strong light; but Sally said the garden was too much work and that she was often lonely here, would rather have lived in the city. How typical of Frank to cherish an ideal of a home in a lovely country place where he could charm and entertain, like the model of an English rural romantic, flowing over with his own bounteous hospitality – and then to abandon his wife and children in it for months at a time while he was away working. On this occasion too Frank was going off somewhere, and he’d asked Christopher to come over to say goodbye, ‘keep Sally’s spirits up’ after his departure.
They had all been out in the back garden when Christopher arrived, and the low rooms indoors, fragrant from the meat roasting with garlic in the kitchen, were dim and cool and restful; he could hear the children shrieking and splashing in the pool. Stepping into the glare again, through the French windows at the back of the house on to the sloping lawn, he seemed to catch the married couple just for one instant as they were when he wasn’t present – seated tense with concentration on their canvas folding chairs, on the terrace Frank had energetically built one past summer, jingling the ice in their gin-and-tonics, intimately unspeaking, in the middle of something. For once Sally’s lifted sharp vixen-face – for that was how he had thought about it since that day, now that he loved her: the velvety fine fur of her skin, russet colouring, slanting long muzzle-like lines of her cheekbones – had been unsmiling and naked, with no charming or placatory mask fixed in its place.
Then Frank had jumped up at the sight of Christopher: relieved, Christopher thought, by their being interrupted, as if that were exactly what he’d been invited for. Dropping a heavy hot arm across his friend’s shoulders, Frank hailed him exuberantly; Christopher felt overdressed because Frank was only wearing khaki cargo shorts and flip-flops. His big brown belly shoved round and tight and unapologetic above his shorts like a pregnant woman’s, and there were forceful scrabbles of black hair on his plump breasts and on his toes; he was one of those men who thrust his imperfect body shamelessly, even keenly, in your line of sight, with a winning, childlike, uninhibited unconsciousness, as if he’d never noticed he wasn’t a cherub any longer. Christopher in his late forties was still straight and slim, six inches taller than Frank and with more hair, even if its fair colour had bleached to neutral; he was pleasant-looking, with a long face, chalky complexion, pale blue eyes under heavy lids. And yet somehow it was ugly Frank, with his sagging baby-face and the untidy bald circle like a tonsure in his black curls, who took everyone’s eye, the women watched him and enjoyed him, and some of the men. They succumbed to his energy, and his self-love.
As soon as Christopher had arrived Frank was in his element, talking, talking; walking up and down the garden with some new flame-throwing gadget he’d acquired to kill weeds in the lawn, blasting at them perilously and leaving blackened patches, talking all the while in his loud, eager, confiding voice, punctuated with shouts of laughter: politics mostly, and gossip about personalities, and books – not fiction (only Sally, of the three of them, read fiction). It was their tradition that Christopher countered Frank with his quiet irony, his good information. He was the corrective to Frank’s dogmatism, his quick-fix partisanship; it was to Frank’s credit that he sought out his friend’s dissent. The oldest boy, Nicholas, had come out of the pool after a while, wrapped in a towel and shivering with wet hair, drawn helplessly to follow the flame-thrower. After lunch – Frank had carved, wielded the knife in alarming proximity to his own naked belly as though he were serving up slices of himself, although Sally remonstrated with him mildly, asked him to put his shirt on, pointed out that she’d made the children get dressed decently before they were allowed at the table – Christopher helped Sally to clear the plates while Frank went to pack, hardly able to repress his jubilation at his imminent escape. –It’s all right for you lucky blighters, he yelled downstairs. –Living the life down here in the country idyll. Some of us have to get back to work, do a reality check!
And then something happened in the pool: a change in the noise of the children’s idling, a splash, and awful screams, brought the adults running down from the house. But all three children seemed to be all right at first, quarrelling and shoving at the pool’s edge, streaming with wet, remonstrating with one another. –Corin’s such a idiot, Nicholas was shouting. –Showing off as usual. Why can’t he do anything properly? He’s got no sense.
The younger boy began staggering about and pretending to puke, or half-puking, in what looked like a pantomime performance of drunkenness. –Is he putting it on? Sally asked, bemused.
–Really he was floating right on the bottom, Mum, Amber said. –It was his own fault. Nicky and me had to dive down to get him out.
–Don’t fuck about though, Frank said to his children genially enough. –This is serious stuff. You’re all right, aren’t you?
When the little one dropped abruptly to his knees, still retching and choking, his eyes rolling up into his head, it was Christopher who scooped him quickly up and performed the necessary manoeuvres, laying him flat on his stomach on the grass and turning his head, making sure he didn’t swallow his tongue, then pumping his frail shoulder blades so that he vomited up quite a quantity of pool-water, mixed with lunch. –My God, my God, Sally whispered in panic and sympathetic horror, crouching beside them, hardly daring in that moment to touch her own child, covering up her mouth with both her hands.
–But he’s all right, isn’t he? said Frank. –I mean, you can’t get out of a pool and walk around and still be drowning, can you?
Once Corin was sitting up again and swearing, weeping, hiding his messy face against Sally and sideswiping with a fist at his brother, Christopher agreed that everything was probably fine now, but said they still ought to take him to a hospital for checking out. Frank was visibly torn – he had a plane to catch. –You go, Christopher said. –It’s only a routine, make sure the lungs are clear. I don’t mind.
And so it was that he had spent all that afternoon and evening waiting in Southwold and District with Sally and Corin; Frank had dropped off his other two children, on his way out, to sleep over at a friend’s house. Eventually the doctors cleared them to go home. Christopher carried the sleeping child up through the front garden from the car in the moonlight, and laid him in his bed while Sally pulled up the duvet tenderly to cover him; Christopher felt as if he’d trespassed for a moment inside the heart of a family life, which was something he’d always wanted for himself but not contrived to get. –You must be flat out, you poor thing, he said kindly to Sally once they’d closed the bedroom door behind them. –Can I get you a nightcap? Or would you like tea? Would you like me to stay?
He had truly only meant that he could kip down, if she liked, in a spare room: make quite sure that she and Corin were both all right in the morning. But the moment the words were out of his mouth he understood how they could be interpreted as a commitment to so much more than merely kindness; and Sally had turned to him, there in the dim light on the landing, burying
her face in his shirt front with a mewing noise of self-abandonment, clinging to him, dropping her whole weight – which wasn’t all that much – against him. –I would like you to stay, I would, she said. Of course it was partly the strain of her afternoon. –He didn’t even ring, did he? To find out how Corin was. I left my phone on deliberately, all that time, even though you’re not supposed to in the hospital.
Christopher tightened his grip cautiously around her, taking her weight. –Of course I can see, he said, –that old Frank could be quite a trial, to be married to.
–Oh, Chris, she groaned, you don’t know the half of it.
Later in bed – they hadn’t quite wanted to make love that first time, not in the same house as the sleeping child saved from disaster, as if that might be unlucky; so that Sally had stayed underneath the duvet and he had stayed on top of it, and the duvet had functioned as a kind of bolster, or a sword, between them, while Christopher held her in his arms to comfort her – she told him quite a lot about the half of it he didn’t know. Although perhaps he knew, or could have guessed, somewhat more of it than he let on: that it wasn’t only women Frank was unfaithful with, and that some of the boys he had were kids, they were really only kids, only just past the age of consent, and that he refused to get himself tested for anything, and that when he woke up with nightmares he needed Sally to comfort him like a baby. And that he’d never ever even once, not once, it was a joke, been there for any of the children’s concerts or birthdays or parent evenings, even though he’d made such a huge deal out of sending them to all those private schools which they couldn’t really conceivably afford. Because naturally there were chronic problems with money too. And as for his drinking, don’t get her started on that. Frank’s eternal absences, Sally said, were the least of her worries. They were the good bit.
And then, when Christopher and Sally had been loving each other clandestinely for about eighteen months, though after that first time they’d never even once spent a whole night together, Frank died reporting on the war in Syria: which you might have thought, looking at it cynically, must be the sort of thing they had been waiting for. It wasn’t a heroic death, he wasn’t shot or blown up or anything, though he might have been, he’d always pushed forward fearlessly into the worst places, despite his nightmares and his secret fears. But he got blood poisoning through a cut in his foot and died remarkably quickly, before anyone even really knew that anything was wrong, in some chaotic hospital on the Turkish border which had been turned upside-down by the war and had no antibiotics.
Christopher heard the news from a friend of a friend who rang him at his office in town. The strangest thing was that he’d already caught sight of Sally and the children that very same morning, before he got the call, just for a few seconds, quite by the most improbable chance – because in London who ever accidentally crossed paths with anyone they knew? He’d been waiting at a crossing on his way to a meeting when he saw Sally driving down Euston Road with all the children, tensely concentrated at the wheel of Frank’s preposterous SUV, which was splattered in Suffolk mud. He knew she hated driving in London and after they’d gone past he’d even wondered, because there was no possible reason for them to all be there on a school day morning, whether he might have conjured them up out of his desire for Sally, like his hallucinations of her presence in his flat.
Something in the collection of their sombre, striking faces – beautifully alike as a donor’s family lined up in graduated profile in a Renaissance altarpiece, all blue-white skin and rusty silky hair, gazing alertly forwards through the windscreen at the traffic – had troubled him even at the time. Lifted in the SUV up above the ordinary level of the street, they had seemed so inaccessible to him. He understood, as soon as he heard the news about Frank, that their bereavement had already fallen on to them, like a cloak – not of invisibility, but of apartness. He called Sally right away, but she didn’t pick up, so he texted. ‘When can we meet?’
–You’ve heard? she texted back, after a little while.
–I’ve heard.
–I’m in town, talking to the FO, she sent. –We have to wait.
They had Frank’s body flown home and at his funeral, where of course Christopher was too – in fact he’d more or less organised it, Sally was in pieces – the distinguished, desolated family made a heart-rending picture, which went the rounds of all the media. You could hardly tell, until you looked carefully, that tiny Sally wasn’t a fourth orphaned child. And after the funeral Christopher was often in their Southwold home for days and weeks at a time, helping Sally out, going through Frank’s papers with her, and his clothes, though she wasn’t good at throwing things away, sorting out probate and closing bank accounts, getting the house ready to put it in the hands of the estate agents. He always slept in the spare room. Once he tried to embrace her when the children were all away, Nicholas boarding at school now (it was what he wanted, and Christopher paid) and the other two at sleepovers. –I can’t, Sally said apologetically, shaking her head, pushing her palms against his chest to keep him off, not meeting his eyes. –Not here. Not yet.
When a year had passed they began talking about buying a house together; Sally had said she hated the country but now it seemed she didn’t want to move into London after all, so he looked in Gloucestershire and found the perfect place. But she still wasn’t ready. –I don’t know what to tell the kids, she said. – Not so soon, when they’re still grieving for their father.
Christopher wondered how much the children were really grieving. They had been shocked out of their serenity and complacency, certainly; sometimes they were self-important with their loss, used it as leverage in their quarrels with Sally. But actually he thought they didn’t miss their father hugely, as if they hadn’t known him very well. They probably didn’t miss him as much as Christopher did. He felt Frank’s absence every day – the space in life where his friend’s noise and his bullying exuberance were missing, and his warmth; and the waste of his death. The children didn’t mind Christopher. Amber aged twelve in her cropped top, wound around with beads and painted with Sally’s eyeshadow and lipstick, flashed her flawless pre-pubertal midriff at him. –Why don’t you just sleep with my mother, Christopher, she drawled, –if you’re so mad about her?
–Well I am mad about her, he said, blushing. –But it’s not quite as easy as all that.
Christopher insisted eventually – for the sake of his own dignity, really, and his self-possession – that Sally come to talk it all out with him at his flat: which wasn’t exactly neutral territory, haunted by the times they had spent there together. The place was still spartan, he hadn’t done anything to it or bought any more furniture, hadn’t wanted to change anything. When he asked why she wouldn’t live with him she sat on the side of his bed with her head in her hands, fox-red hair falling forwards over her face. He dragged over a box of the books he’d never got round to unpacking and sat down on it, opposite to her, close enough to touch but not touching, watching her intently.
–It isn’t the children really, is it? he gently said. –It’s you.
–Chris, I can’t leave the house. Frank’s present in it everywhere. I can’t leave him. I feel all the things I didn’t use to feel. Think of his achievements! I’m reading everything he’s written. Isn’t it good? And I’m finding all these souvenirs and photographs, things from his childhood and boyhood, trophies and model aeroplanes and letters he wrote to his mother from school, all that stuff. I’m thinking about all those places he went in his adult life, sending back his reports – I never really asked, what was it like there? What was it really like? I’m cheated, by his leaving me this way. Because something’s still unfinished between us.
–Between us? Christopher pressed her, needing to be sure.
–Between Frank and me.
And he knew that although by this time Sally had dropped her hands from her face and was looking right at him, she couldn’t see him.
GILES FODEN
THE ROAD TO GABO
N
IT MUST HAVE been late autumn when Richard Rennison drove down from Notting Hill to Combe Britton to see Maudsley, poor man. Grey vapour swept towards the windscreen of the Lexus; it seemed to fold into it, as if the glass were absorbing a doubt about its own substance. When he came to the lanes, the boughs and leaves of the trees (forming in places arches which combined to create the effect of a tunnel) were dripping with a wet heaviness; and these leaves and boughs, too, appeared to be losing their edges, as if unsure whether they were part of that vivid organic life we call nature, or part of the coming night.
Night was part of nature, of course. But it also seemed to stand in his mind for some of those parts of humankind that humanity opposes to nature. As, driving, he thought about this division, it took the mental shape of the pixel grid with which digital designers manipulate images, each calibrated little cell making discrete what was in life continuous, and subjecting to rule what were in reality strange, irregular rhythms. Rennison, too, tended to make digital adjustments of this type before sending in his edit, though it was something Maudsley guyed him about, saying if a photographer were not homo mimeticus, who in the wide world would be?
He took a corner too fast, became aware that he needed to pay better attention to the road if he were not going to kill himself (on this or the next blind bend), and with that jolly admonition, and a lessening of pace, the tail of his thoughts returned to Maudsley. Teasing each other was part of the traditional pattern of their relationship, though that had changed in the past year, as Maudsley faced what he called his next big adventure.