by Susan Sallis
They had their five years and more. David’s father had a stroke and moved into Tall Trees, the nursing home just above their bungalow. They visited him often, and he sometimes walked down on Sundays for lunch. He used two sticks and was stubbornly independent. He still thought Viv was ‘tops’ as he put it, but also he thought she was the reason he was not sharing the bungalow.
Sometimes she caught him looking at her from beneath a frown. She asked David to find out what was wrong, and he talked to his father. Nothing came of it. But subtly something changed in the marriage. And then, very unsubtly, everything changed.
She could not tell David what it was. She could not tell him that at forty years old she was pregnant. They were still loving friends. She had learned over the last ten years that David was indeed impotent. He never told her why, and she could never ask, but as her trust in him grew until she was part of him in every other way, she knew that they would never be able to become physically one. He had married her on her own terms. And gradually she understood why. It became part of her love for him; she took the responsibility for their friendship on to her own shoulders. They shared all thoughts, fears, joys . . . except the one. So she could not tell him that she was pregnant. And it therefore followed that she was unable to tell him that in order to save her marriage she would have to have an abortion.
It was 18 November and a late half-term, so she had been home all week. She took the car out of the garage on to the sandy road. He came out of the front door and raised his eyebrows at her through the window. She wound it down.
‘I need a few things. For Christmas. Thought I’d dash into Bristol.’
He pretended that was all right and nodded. ‘I’m coming. Wait until I get my jacket.’
He trusted her not to drive away without him, although she had been shutting herself off for two or three weeks now. It was his trust that made her wait for him. She thought of that often, later.
It was when they were driving down the combe that separated country from city . . . it was then that it happened. There were hairpin bends and woods either side. She remembered nothing about the event. She assumed there had been a fault in the steering. It seemed to become loose between her hands. After that, nothing.
She was cut out of the driver’s seat by the firemen. David, still strapped into his seat, was found against a tree. He was dead. She was hospitalized until just before Christmas. Nobody ever mentioned a baby.
A few weeks after it had happened, David’s father staggered down to the bungalow and washed up the breakfast things, then went into the bedroom and made the bed and folded David’s pyjamas and Viv’s nightie. On the way back to Tall Trees he collapsed, and a few days later he died.
Vivian’s story
2006
I came out of hospital in December some time. I don’t remember anything about the accident and very little about the hospital. There was an inquiry – something official – about the car. Nobody ever told me what it was all about. I came home. Everything was neat. People rang up. Some people came with flowers and fruit as if I were ill. Someone showed me the headline in our local paper from November: ‘Local couple in crash tragedy’. It seemed to be about someone else entirely.
A couple of the nurses from Tall Trees came and told me they could do with help with the flowers, and now that I was alone perhaps I would be interested. When I said something about David’s father they nodded and said they understood that the home held sad memories too, but if I could not bear it then I should join the local bereavement group, because it was not good to be isolated up here like I was. They did not realize that isolation was all I wanted. I wanted the white silence; I wanted the void; I wanted whole sections of time to pass without me knowing it. It was when time was marked out by visitors and phone calls and the need to eat or put on other clothes or wash my unwanted body . . . it was then that everything became unbearable. It was when I had to think. I could not think. The pills helped. But not always. And when it became unbearable, I ran. A woman at the bereavement group suggested writing it all down, but that didn’t work. There was nothing to write down. That was what I wanted, and that was how it was. Nothing. The woman said to write down what I saw when I ran. But I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I felt nothing. That was the whole point of it.
But then, months later, something happened. Something that frightened me, jolted me out of my void and into something else . . . I did not want to forget it. It was something I had to remember, and I had to remember it properly, as it happened. So I started writing it down. I made myself into an observer. I observed. I recorded.
It was another of those nights. End of September. I had forgotten to take the pills. I focused on my watch and saw it was two o’clock. I had got into bed almost two hours earlier, listened to the World Service without hearing anything, and was now rigid with the effort of not thinking. I knew I wouldn’t sleep until it was light.
I got up and twitched the curtains aside; the garden was lit theatrically by moonlight, and I stood there and fought for emptiness. It was often easier at night because of the darkness, but the moonlight was too bright. Much too bright.
I dropped the curtain angrily, holding my head, screwing up my eyes. I had various methods of controlling thought, but when it was really bad like this, action – frantic action – was the only cure I knew. I turned towards my clothes – thrown over a chair last night – and dragged on the jogging bottoms and top, stuffing pyjamas in anyhow, adding a knitted cap pulled well down over lank brown hair, opening a drawer for gloves, finding none and slamming it shut. There was absolutely no need to hurry, but I grabbed keys and ran down the hall as if I had a train to catch. The mirror reflected me running towards it, tall and skinny, lank hair still in its rubber band, empty eyes and bony face registering exhaustion. The grandmother clock gleamed for an instant, it was ten past two.
At first my body had difficulty in keeping up with my legs. I live on the Tump and all roads go down to the sea very steeply. My arms pumped, reaching in front of me as if I could brake myself against the thin night air. My legs leapt in huge giant leaps; I could not slow them, not even to turn right into Easter Lane. And then, as the road levelled slightly into the series of hairpin bends leading to the sea one way and the village the other, I managed a decelerating jog – and finally came to a stop just before the next bend. My lungs were pumping like mad; I stopped and hung on to a wall retaining a terrace. I was so hot I thought I might explode; I whipped off my hat and stuffed it into a trouser pocket, unzipped my top and let the cold light beat on my pyjama jacket. I did not allow myself the inevitable question – what on earth was I doing there at that time of night? Had I done so, the answer would have been obvious. I couldn’t sleep; my thoughts were getting out of hand, and I was doing something about it. But it would be another four hours before it was light enough for me to allow myself a morning jog . . . I was like a drinker only allowing themselves refreshment after the sun reaches the yardarm . . . or something similar. So I could not ask myself that question. Sometimes an addict has to break their own rules.
My body cooled, and my breathing slowed, and I started running again to the next hairpin bend. Down another level, across the road, plunging down the donkey path and landing up on the tiny promenade opposite the bandstand. And there it was: the silver sea, the dark shapes of land thrusting into it, lights here and there. A pocket-book resort; ice cream and coffee and a posh Italian restaurant, and the daddy-long-legs pier striding out, much as I had giant strode down. And all lit by that moon. It looked totally artificial.
If I had wanted to take my mind off whatever it had been on, then I couldn’t have done better than come to the side of the sea, where everything declared itself to be unreal: a stage set with an expert lighting technician sitting around somewhere, unobserved in a box. I had made model theatres like this when I was ten, cardboard cut-outs in cardboard shoe boxes, lit cunningly with a couple of torches. The brilliant thing about them had been their very limited lif
e. Someone trod on them, or they had simply fallen to pieces when my mother caught them in the vacuum. Then they went into the incinerator, and I made another. Even better. No broken hearts; a pang, maybe. My mother had been alive, then.
Could I make another? That was definitely not the right question. The right question was: did I want to make another? And I knew the answer to that.
I walked slowly over to the Victorian railings that guarded the drop down to the rocks, and stared over the gleaming mud towards the islands, very black lumps in the midst of all that silvery movement. That’s what painters couldn’t get: the constant movement. They could come near to it, especially if the viewer stood well back. Too close and it became clear it was a static sea. No such thing. Art could not even begin to imitate life. Once life was gone there was nothing and art, literature, music . . . they were all rubbish. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish!
I was gripping the railings, shaking them with each repeated word.
Below me, half-way down the slipway, part of the darkness shifted slightly. Someone was trying to sleep in one of the boats, and the whining gripe of the railings had disturbed them. I turned, walked quickly away from the view of the beach, and then went into a jog again. The bandstand was left behind, and there was the huge secondary loop of the bay where the amusement arcades, crazy golf, tennis courts and playing fields grouped themselves in the shadow of Becket’s Hill. And in the darkest arm of the hill was the lake: an artificial lake, the sharp angle between the bay at Becket’s Hill cut off by concrete and fed every high tide by the sea.
I hadn’t meant to go so far; the run back up the zigzag of roads and lanes to the Tump would take three times as long to climb as it had to descend. The lake was a mile away, maybe more.
But for some reason, I wanted to see it. The moon could not reach it; it was dark and full of secrets. I rammed on my hat again, not breaking the rhythm of the jog; I started a pattern of breathing. The promenade narrowed to a path, all on the level. I pumped my arms. There was no space anywhere for a single thought. On my right the railings flicked by, and on my left the occasional overflowing litter bin would be lit by a surround of broken bottles glinting in the moonlight. The sea was sibilant, tide well out. The bulk of Becket’s loomed closer; the hill itself was clothed in trees almost all the way to its summit. The top rose bald and unadorned. Becket’s assassins were supposed to have stood there and looked out to sea at the islands and possible refuge.
Darkness closed in, the railings became a wall, the path divided and went into the woods on my left and led to steps on my right, and I stopped, almost collapsing on to the wall, panting, closing my eyes while I concentrated on breathing.
When I opened them the blackness had graded itself into black and very black. I stayed where I was, leaning on the wall at the head of the steps, staring down at the water. Here and there a ripple would pick up a reflection of the moon, and when my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I could just make out the concrete blocks that had been the foundations of the old diving boards, and the broken bases of the changing huts. The expanse of water had been divided by ‘causeways’ of rocks: a shallow paddling pool, a boating lake, a deep water area for swimmers. We’d always set up our deckchairs behind the diving area, where the sun was trapped after midday. We’d wallowed in its warmth whenever we could, then swum for half an hour or more before towelling off and collapsing into the chairs again. And then the picnic stuff had come out.
I was so exhausted that the memories ached instead of screamed. In any case it was hard to fit them into this black hole beneath me. Retrospectively, it seemed to have been filled, always, with sunlight. The row of changing huts had been rainbow-painted; Mrs Bartholomew, who was in charge of everything, had run a very tight ship indeed. No running or jumping or changing on the promenade, and certainly no pushing or shoving or throwing clothes about. Her voice was not exactly stentorian, but everyone could hear it, and nobody ever disobeyed Mrs B. She was a champion swimmer, and a top-rate first-aider. When she was there, all was absolutely well. But she wasn’t there any more, and neither was anything she had so carefully looked after.
I took a deep breath and went towards the steps. I had let myself remember without becoming frantic; up to a point I was in control – as Mrs B had been in control. Why hadn’t I run here before now? Because it was derelict and unwanted? Yet that was the kind of place I could relate to. Even so, I had to steel myself . . . dare myself to go down those steps and walk that wide promenade alongside the paddling pool. I was on the top step; I dared myself again and the voice inside me was high and hysterical as usual, but with another note. Challenging? I moved down two steps.
The little promenade, as it had been called, was so full of blackness that it became another dimension. I touched my toe from the last step on to the slimy flagstones, as I had touched bottom when I’d jumped off the edge of the deep end. Then, I had bent my knees automatically and straightened them immediately – a reflex action, a living being making for the light. Now, I could not do that. I gripped the handrail hard and put both feet down solidly, and stood there looking into and at the blackness, smelling it, tasting it, cold and somehow heavy.
After what seemed a long time, I moved away from the handrail towards a glimmer of light, which was the moon reflecting on the rock pools beyond the lake wall. That had been the deep end, where the diving tower had stretched its single arm over the steps. Neither tower nor steps were there any more, but the blackness was just a little less black here, and I could see things moving in the water, and gradually identified them as beer cans, plastic bags and what looked like orange peel – all tangled into a mat with seaweed. I looked back to the steps leading to the top path. They had disappeared into the blackness, too. I had scuffed and foot-felt my way right around the paddling pool and up to the sheer wall that dammed in the sea water at every high tide. There was nowhere else to go unless I wanted to walk along the top of the wall to the boating pool and then the sand pit, and I could hear Mrs Bartholomew’s voice saying sternly, ‘Anyone who walks along there risks their lives and the lives of others. Therefore anyone making such an attempt will be banned from the lake for the rest of the summer.’ Not that I would have tried it, anyway; I have a fear of heights.
So I had to go back the way I had come, shuffling through dried seaweed and other unidentifiable rubbish through the dense blackness to the steps. Then I supposed I had to go home. I did not want to do that.
What happened next is difficult to explain. I was standing above the wrack of litter, looking down, seeing now with accustomed vision the inevitable movement of all that trapped fluid, and I felt the faintest of pressures in the small of my back. Just sufficiently strong to let me know that I had jogged twice as far as usual, yet insistent enough that I took a small step back from the edge. And then it became stronger. I resisted it but was forced to take half a step forward again. And then quite suddenly it was a small shove.
I am pretty certain I could have withstood it, turned to my right and walked back into the darkness. But I didn’t. I let it push me into the water, and so that I could avoid the tangled mess of rubbish edging towards the wall, I gave it impetus and leapt forward and over the wrack and smashed the calmness of the lake with a knees-up bomb. That’s what the children called this kind of entry. A bomb.
There was no time to think. I didn’t reach the bottom; for a short while my jogging stuff and pyjamas held enough air to send me to the surface like a cork, and I struck out wildly before they could absorb enough water to become a dead weight. And for some reason I did not immediately turn and swim through the wrack to the edge – maybe four strokes – I made for the other side where the wall dividing the deep end from the boating lake showed a clear silvery line of moonshine. A long swim for me at the best of times. This was certainly not one of those.
Half-way there I had to tread water while I kicked off trainers and struggled out of jogging bottoms and then top. I was exhausted. I lay on my back and did my thing
with breathing again. Also I looked back into the blackness of the hill. Someone had pushed me in. Was that why I had not turned and gone back? I couldn’t see a thing, of course. But there had been that pressure; and surely – surely – the pressure had ended up in a definite push?
I rolled on to my front and began the very gentle sort of breaststroke that would eventually get me to that wall. I talked to myself. No panic. You’re fine. Just do it slowly, then you haul yourself up and bump or crawl along to the shallows of the paddling pool and wade out. All right, so you have to go back into the blackness and find the steps up to the top, but if someone actually did this thing, they’d hardly wait around. They’d be clambering through the woods of Becket’s Hill right now. You just have to jog home – bare-footed and pyjama’d – and get under a very hot shower. And forget all about it. The chap you disturbed in the boat on the slipway . . . it could have been him getting his own back. He’s got no idea where you live. At least it stops you thinking about the past. This . . . here and now . . . has to be dealt with. And there is absolutely no need to panic.
But I couldn’t help it. Now and then I felt myself trying to scramble through the water, convinced I had made no headway whatsoever. And then I’d take in a mouthful of the black water, and though it was salt it was not quite the salt of the sea. The lake had been derelict for so long, it was full of rubbish. I cleared my throat and spat vigorously and then had to do the breathing again.
Eventually I reached the wall. I was almost exhausted. I managed to push myself up and out of the water high enough to get the fingers of one hand on the top of the wall; it was incredibly rough but for a few minutes it provided a respite. Then I had to let go and my pyjamas tore against the armour of dead shells and flints below water level. I felt myself weeping with terror and frustration. I tried – three or four times – to get a better handhold on the wall. When at last I did I could not hold my body weight for long enough to begin to move myself along the wall by hand. I tried to use my feet to scramble up the ragged surface but soon fell back helplessly. I floated again, calming myself somehow, pushing gently with one hand towards the paddling pool. The panic now was about my own strength. It was ebbing fast.