In life, everything, including love, is fleeting.
I hadn’t spoken to Santanu again before leaving London.
Perhaps Eva would prove a more helpful companion, but by now she would be across the world, with Tamsin in Japan.
Then I told Myra about Eva.
Her silken peacock dresses. Her immaculate hair. Her great and gaping emptiness.
I told her about Stefan. “He sends her flowers to mark time.”
Love came in the shape of lilies.
Myra sighed. “How can I say she’s foolish? I have no right.”
And neither did I.
We burned log after log to keep the fire going. I told her how, when we were children, my sister and I would dry orange peel in the sun, and then toss it into the fireplace. They’d splutter in the flames, a mini fireworks display that thrilled us each time. Oranges were the smell of my childhood.
“Paint,” she said. “Mine is paint.” Sitting close to her mother, for hours playing with old tubes and brushes. “She’d call me her little helper.” Myra laughed, tipping the glass to her lips. Then she looked at me, her eyes the color of a summer evening, a deep, endless blue. Her hair glowing liquid bronze. Like the trees in London in autumn. My lost season. For an instant, I wanted to reach out and touch her, the slope of her cheek where light slanted off, the plane of her hand lit by firelight.
“What do you think it is?” she asked. “The memory of happiness that has passed, is it happy or sad?”
The wine swirled full and viscous on my tongue.
Neither, I said. And both.
Memory only gives us back what we had on condition we know it has been lost.
To remake the world, we need first to understand it has ended.
Later, filled with a low tuneful humming, I climbed the stairs to the loft, slip-sliding on the wet wooden surface. The room lay in unbroken darkness; here the rain sounded louder, closer, drumming on the skylights. Let me in.
As I drifted to sleep, lulled by wine and the wind, I thought I heard the door open, the soft pad of footfall, the hush of breath. I dreamed a warm, rain-splattered body slipped into bed beside me.
It was Nicholas.
It was someone smaller, lighter, with longer hair, and a softer mouth. A silky gown that slipped off easily. Someone with skin smooth as a seashore pebble, a neck that arched, a pool of deep, endless wetness. In the dark, she was above me, her lips parted like petals, light under my touch, on her, so clumsy. A small mole on the nape of her neck, a beacon I returned to again and again. She was wine and fire. A furious rising. Tonight, the creatures above us were silent. We were watched only by rain and darkness, somewhere behind that, the stars. At the end, I buried my face into her shoulder, and she gasped and held me with fingers that felt like butterflies.
Once, on my wanderings around London, lost somewhere near Green Park, I chanced upon an art gallery open late in the evening. From the outside, it glowed white and glassy, and I walked in because there didn’t seem to be any works on display. Apart from mirrors. I was intrigued.
“The past behind… and the future before us.”
A sum of all we are, and all we are becoming.
“Or,” she added, “in the case of the Aymara people in the Andes, the past lies ahead.”
For it can be seen. This is who you are—the entirety of everything that has come before—and it stands there, a steady yet fragile reflection. The future stays behind, unknown, unseen, unfathomable.
Standing there, glimpsing myself in those strange paintings, I thought of how they inhabit the same, and different worlds entirely, one perpetually in the state of becoming the other. Yet there is a moment, in the split second when you lift a finger to the mirror when they touch, and are inexplicably identical.
It felt that way in Wintervale.
“It’s another country.”
I shouted, to make myself heard above the wind, lashing across the moors.
“I brought Nicholas here once,” said Myra. “He hated it. For him, only the frenetic madness of the city.”
She stood beside me in her tweed coat and woollen beret, smoking, her gloved fingers speckled with ash. I could still taste her smoke-wine tongue. In the early hours of that morning, I’d awakened, amazed by the length of her by my side. Her bare back turned towards me, pebble-smooth, angular, dipped between her shoulder blades, her skin marked by pale freckles. I wanted to run my fingers along her outline, to trace her and place her like a leaf between my hands. She left soon after, saying she wouldn’t like Elliot to awake and not find her home, but even now, after breakfast and an hour’s drive to the moors, I was still replete with her. I wanted to stand behind her, beside her, in front, all at once, so wherever the wind would blow, it would carry her fragrance.
How infinitely modest are the steps that change our lives.
How unassumingly bereft of all fanfare and flourish.
At that precise time, if it hadn’t been for the storm, I would have been on a train bound for London.
Philip, who returned that morning, earlier than we anticipated, came bearing news that fallen trees had disrupted rail services to the city. They’d closed the line, and since it was Sunday, it possibly wouldn’t reopen until the next day.
“Oh, so you can’t possibly leave now…” said Myra.
I said I was sure they’d arranged a rail replacement service; it might take me an extra few hours but I’d get back to the city eventually…
“Those coaches are beastly… do stay… and we can drive to the moors… they’ll have it all cleared up soon, I’m sure… Isn’t your ticket valid for the rest of the week?”
It was.
Philip sat aside, stirring his tea, watching us in silence.
“They’re one of the oldest breeds in the world… can you imagine?” said Myra. “To have been around unchanged for twelve thousand years.”
Like seahorses.
“It makes one feel so… fleeting.”
I placed my arm around her waist; at the moment, I didn’t want to hear talk of ephemerality. I’d dreamed again of Lenny, and if it hadn’t been for her, lying beside me when I awoke, I would have been filled with an old sadness. But it had dissipated when she smiled sleepily, and reached out to stroke my cheek.
Before us, the moors sloped and rose endlessly, while behind, they were as flat as the sea. It hadn’t snowed yet this winter, but sprinklings of frost glistened in the afternoon light. The longer I stood there, the more I felt steeped in beautiful desolation.
We walked back toward the road, stepping carefully on the sedge, keeping a lookout for patches of boggy marsh. Myra said she’d take the longer way home, and drive by the coast, so I could see the highest sea cliffs in the country. A twenty-one-mile route, along which we could stop at a pub for a meal.
“And tomorrow,” she added, “we can visit Exeter… glorious twelfth-century cathedral…”
In the car, the radio crackled, disappeared, returning only in patchy stretches. Elliot sat in the back, playing with his toy soldiers, who were now riding imaginary moorland ponies.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Myra, “why don’t you stay on for Christmas?” It was, she added, merely a few days away.
I hesitated.
“It’ll be fun… Mrs Hammond’s magnificent roast turkey… crackers at the table… eggnog… and I promise I’ll buy you a present.”
I said I wasn’t sure about her father, what he’d have to say. Only for him would I prefer to leave as scheduled.
She kept her eyes on the road, unwavering.
“Have you had… friends… staying over before?” I asked. When she didn’t answer, I wondered wildly whether I had been intrusive. Here existed such firm, delicate lines of etiquette. “What I meant was… has he been alright… in the past?”
Her features were set, firm, defiant. “He has no right to say no.”
When we met him later, at supper, she’d tell him, that I would stay on a little longer.
&
nbsp; “Won’t I see you in London? For concerts…”
Not anytime soon. There was a reason why January was called the dead month.
The narrow road winding through the park hit the coast and—just as a million others whose eyes unexpectedly glimpsed the sea, its sudden vastness—we fell silent. In the distance, the coastline curved, a ribbon of rock, edged by feathery white water.
“Mummy,” shouted Elliot, “we’re at the edge.”
“Yes,” said Myra, “the very end of land.”
That evening, when we sat down to supper, Philip seemed, to my relief, quite affable. Loosened by his time away in London. It mustn’t be easy, I supposed, having to care for his daughter and grandson on his own. Perhaps the strange net he cast around them sprang from a need to keep them protected and close.
He asked about our day.
We told him where we’d been. “It was quite incredible.” I still hadn’t lost the urge to end my sentences with sir.
“I’d go riding there on Charlie,” he said. “Poor boy loved it… we’d do part of Coleridge Way, from Stowey to Monksilver… can’t take General, though, he’s terrified of ditches… had an accident when he was a foal… never quite got over it, poor chap. I remember once when I was out with Charlie, we were caught in a storm, snow in May… and then suddenly blazing sunshine… crazy weather out there on the moors…”
“Yes,” said Myra, “who said only cities were mad.”
“We saw horses!”
“Ponies, Elliot,” corrected his grandfather. “Exmoor ponies. They almost became extinct during the war… fifty left… fortunately they survived. They’re rounded up every year at Winsford Hill and counted. Took the boys for a school trip once…”
The conversation lapsed into appreciative dining silence. Mrs Hammond had slow roasted a leg of lamb, sprinkled with fresh herbs, alongside crisp new potatoes and charred parsnips. We were drinking a deep, majestic red, Côtes du Rhône it said across the label.
“How was London?” asked Myra.
“The usual… frenetic as ever.”
He gestured at the wine; she passed the bottle to him.
“We’re planning a drive to Exeter tomorrow… to see the priory and the cathedral. I even managed to convince Nem to stay on… for Christmas.”
If she was nervous, it didn’t show. I balanced the sliced meat and vegetables carefully on my fork. I kept my eyes on my plate.
There was brief, concentrated silence, and then Philip said, “I see.”
Mrs Hammond walked in to ask if anyone would like an extra serving of roast. She’d been keeping it warm in the oven.
“Oh, yes, please,” said Myra. “It’s divine. I’m starving… must be all that fresh moor air.”
For the rest of the meal, we said nothing more of my staying or leaving—conversation veered far and away—yet I could feel, sometimes, the flick of Philip’s glance, on me, on Myra. I drank my wine slowly. Keeping mostly silent. I’m uncertain how to describe it plainly—it felt similar to the fear I knew in the forest, in the Ridge, something dark and elusive, tainting me with its wings. After our meal, I didn’t linger by the fire as usual, but headed to the loft, leaving Elliot to watch his Sunday special television show and Myra to usher him to bed.
She walked me to the door—“I’ll see you later”—and, after a quick glance around, kissed me. Her lips tasted of dessert—sweet, tangy rhubarb.
The loft felt more enclosed than ever. Pacing the room, I could count it out, fifteen steps across, ten the other way. In London, my studio was smaller. I wished I could open the skylights, freshen the place with some cold night air. If there was a radio, I would’ve turned it on, the murmur of voices to keep away the silence.
At about half past ten, Myra crept in through the door.
I was trying to read through my article, although mostly it lay face up on my lap.
“Do you think…” I began, but she’d already crossed the room, and lifted herself on the bed, on me. The papers fell to the floor, scattering.
“Maybe it’s better… I leave tomorrow…”
I cupped her face, her hair tangled in my fingers. In this light, her eyes were inky, like the horizon of the sea.
“But… why?”
“Your father… I don’t think…”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I can’t not… don’t you see…”
For a moment we held our stares in silence, then I pulled her closer, and we kissed. I ran my hands over her ankles, her calves, her thighs. She had nothing on under her knitted dress—it was woolly and grey as though she’d draped on a cloud or a plume of smoke. I slipped it off; she shivered, under my fingers, at the touch of air, the nip of coolness.
They are different, the skin of men and women.
And Myra’s softer than I ever could imagine. Tonight, brushed by the smell of the moors, its secrets and wildness. She sat up and pinned me back, her hands quick and cold against my chest, as she pulled off my jumper, unbuttoned my shirt, reached for my belt.
It is always like this, the shrinking of the world to touch.
The sudden discovery of wetness, a gathering on the tongue of everything felt and swallowed. Saltiness like sea water. The heaving of waves, of arched backs. A sound forced from between our meeting skins, loud, incongruous. Like a fart. Our quick laughter.
The bracing heaviness of limbs.
“Wait,” she said and stopped me. She stepped off the bed and opened the cupboard door, aligning the mirror so it caught our reflection, glowing ferociously in the light of the small, low lamp. It watched us, moving, Myra facing herself, the curve of her shoulders, and me further away, behind her, my arms outstretched on her back, along the length of her spine. We watched ourselves. Until the knot tightened, in the pit of us, and suddenly it was everywhere.
After, she switched off the lamp, and lit a cigarette, a glowing pinprick in the darkness. For some reason, I remembered Kalsang. His long, tree-twig limbs.
She was looking at the ceiling, and didn’t turn to me when she asked, “Why did you love Nicholas?”
There was only one answer. Which I’d searched for as long as I could remember.
“To you, he was breath… for me, he was like a beautiful word that you learn to say… and your tongue is forever changed because you can pronounce it.”
For a long while we didn’t speak, the silence interrupted by the soft flutter of wings coming from the rafters above us, and her voice: “The sex was good too, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
We looked at each other and laughed.
She rested her head on my shoulder, on my scar, a line of white. “Why did he say he saved you?”
“Because… in a way, he did.” I told her about the friend I’d lost.
“What was his name?”
“Lenny.”
Buried in a cemetery in my hometown, which I hadn’t visited in many years. I found it—difficult to go back.
She looked up at the painting, reaching out as though to touch it. “She was an art teacher at the school where my father was headmaster… nobody could understand why they were together, least of all why they got married, had a child. They were so different…”
They hadn’t been close, she and her father. Although circumstances had created prolonged proximity. Sometimes, that was even more difficult to discard.
When her mother died, Myra was nineteen. She studied music, because she couldn’t paint.
I traced her outline slowly on the sheet, making a cut-out to carry with me always.
“Did he ever say anything… about me?”
“Who?” She asked even though she knew.
“Nicholas… about why he left Delhi.”
She sat up against a pillow, balancing the cigarette so the ash wouldn’t tip over on the sheets. “Not about you, no… I mean, not that I asked him either,” she added quickly. “But he did say, once, that if he’d stayed, it would have killed him…”
“The city? Or the summer? Or
me?”
“The summer,” she said earnestly, “I’m sure he meant the summer.”
I laughed out loud.
“What?” asked Myra. “What is it?”
Instead of answering, I drew her forehead to my lips.
She stubbed the cigarette on the bedside table. “I spoke to dad again… about you staying… it’s fine, honestly. He doesn’t mind at all.”
Somehow, I found that hard to believe.
“Anyway, wouldn’t you miss me?” She pressed closer, her legs entangling mine, guiding my hands over her, and I conceded.
Myra was on her side, asleep, her hair smoothed like fire over the pillow. I stood at the window; Philip, it seemed, slept very little. A light burned in a room in the house; I could see him through the gap in the curtain. He was up, the glow of the computer screen falling on his face. I stared at his profile a long while, before he stood up and shifted out of sight.
By morning, Myra was gone.
And the world was white. It had snowed a few inches during the night, although it didn’t seem like it would stick for long. Most of it was already melting into muddy slush.
I walked outside and picked up a handful. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen snow—my parents took us to Tawang once in January, a town in the hills of Arunachal Pradesh—but it had been decades. It stung my fingers, dissolving against the warmth of my skin.
At breakfast, the radio was left on, tuned into the local channel. The weather forecast predicted more bad weather, especially to the south-west where we’d planned on a drive.
“Best if we stayed in,” said Myra. “I hate driving with ice on the road. We could take a walk later, if you like… there’s a ruined castle not far from here.”
That, I said, sounded a better alternative; I was all too aware of Philip, at the head of the table, buttering his toast, watching us.
“Why don’t you come for a ride?” he asked. “I was hoping to take both the horses out today. They’re a bit restless cooped up over the weekend.”
Myra said that sounded like a good plan. I’d like that, wouldn’t I? “Although you were quite sore after that first day…” she added.
Seahorse Page 21