She pulls a chair round so she can sit facing the boy and pretend to be looking at him should anyone enter the room, but what she is looking at, through the wall, is the workshop’s forecourt and the flowers that sprouted between the seams of the disintegrating concrete. Inside the shed stood the remnants of a huge machine, fixed to the floor with bolts the size of pint glasses. On hot days the whole shed smelled of oil. Lidless drums of oil lay all over the place, and at the far end there was a pit that was flooded with oily sludge, in which dozens of cardboard boxes had been thrown and were melting into the ooze. And there were hundreds of feathers in the sludge as well, because birds had nested on the high steel beams. From the ground you could just see the twigs sticking out, and once they saw an owl, tucked into the corner above the winch, sitting as still as a jar. By the back door there was a stack of old tyres and wheels and some lumps of steel, small but too heavy for them to lift and covered with powdery rust that dyed your hands tangerine. The yard had become a meadow and for hours they would play there, the three of them, hiding under blankets of weeds, and sometimes she would climb up onto the roof of what had been the office, from where she could see the town in the distance, and there she would read for an hour, sitting in a piece of a lorry’s bodywork that curved as comfortably as a deckchair. Towards the end of the afternoon she would lie in the long grass, as the grass turned the colour of the grass in the painting, exactly this green-gold colour. Looking at the smiling boy, she asks herself why she was so happy there. It was uniquely strange, the atmosphere inside the high-ceilinged shed, and that is part of the answer, as are the colours of the sunlit grass and the luminous rust and the wildflowers that grew in the yard. And the smells of warm earth and warm metal and the thick sweet smell of oil, they are part of the answer, and the secretiveness of those afternoons. When she thinks of that summer it is as if she is remembering a dream. Those afternoons were a dream, she tells herself, and then she understands that is the essence of the answer: those afternoons in the deserted workshop were a dream, because time does not pass in a dream. Going home in the evening they carried the happiness of the afternoon with them, and they knew that tomorrow they could go back and it would be the same. It was a dream to which they could return whenever they wanted to. They would play and lie in the sun, in the overgrown grass behind the ruined shed, and the hours would stop. And now her life is passing, sometimes at a crawl and sometimes in a rush, but always passing, and already a quarter of her life has gone. She can see the friends of her childhood still, but they are being borne away, and one day they will be lost. One day the time she spent with them will have become as insubstantial as the time when she was with her father.
She looks across at the bride. This face was a real face, and somewhere there’s a piece of earth that holds her skull. Her eyes are full of earth now and the little boy is dead. All these people are dead, and nothing is left of them but bones. The thought makes her shudder, as if their bones were scattered around her feet. She clenches her teeth and presses hard on her eyelids, making blood-coloured shapes swim in her sight. Almost at a run, she rushes out of the Randall Room and down the steps, and onto the shell path. At the bench she wrenches open her book, reads a sentence without understanding it, raises the book to her face like a blindfold. Unable to remember what happened before the page she is on, she flicks back to the nearest chapter break, and begins again.
She has been reading, haltingly, for more than an hour when she sees a middle-aged man in a crumpled blue jacket approaching the bench by the tall hedge, twenty yards away. Smiling, as if at someone who is waiting there for him, he limps towards the seat, leaning on a walking stick with which he strikes the front bar of the bench twice, before slowly turning and sitting down. Like someone preparing to have his photograph taken, he runs his fingers rapidly through his hair. From inside his jacket he takes a little radio, which he places on the arm of the bench. As he bends forward to extract another radio, identical to the first, from within his jacket, she notices that the dark circle around his eye, which she had mistaken for a patch of shadow, is in fact a bruise. He places the other radio in his lap and presses a button on the first one. Six or seven pigeons, strutting across the grass, begin to flap their wings. The man scowls with disproportionate irritation. Leaning forward, he listens – it’s a cassette player, not a radio. What he hears seems to worry him. He mouths a phrase, frowning, as he picks up the second machine. He raises it to his mouth. The pigeons take off and he watches them fly away, over her head. She watches him as he seems to lose sight of the birds in the open sky. Looking straight at her, not seeing her, he speaks into the recorder, while his free hand makes rocking motions in the air, like the conductor of an orchestra. Wincing, as though at a discord, he stops both machines, shaking his head, displeased.
Conscious of her discourtesy, she stretches out on the bench, facing away from him. She tries to read her book, but it cannot hold her attention. After every page or two she looks up, to see the blind man smiling as if he has heard something unexpected on the tape, or seeming to listen to something in the garden. Acknowledging that she is incapable of behaving as she should, she shuts the book. The blind man is holding a machine in each hand. Directed into the leaves above his head, his face is speckled with sunlight. His lips are moving, making the same movement over and over again.
Taking a circuitous route, so as not to pass near him, she returns to her room to collect her bikini. Alone in the pool, she swims length after length, as fast as she can, but however hard she swims she cannot get the man out of her head. Resting in the water, she thinks about what she felt when she was watching him. She should feel sorry for him, and she does feel sorry for him, but not as much as she should, perhaps because he gave the impression of not being pitiable. More than that, there was something charismatic about him, a sense of intelligence and complete absorption, as he listened and talked to himself, like a saint or a mystic, ecstatic, repeating the words of the voice he hears in his head. In the hope of seeing him again, she goes back to the garden, by the outside steps. Before she has let go of the handrail she hears her father’s voice, coming from the back of the building. She creeps towards the corner and peers round it, pulling back a strand of ivy like a spy in a terrible comedy. At the foot of the steps that go up to the Randall Room her father, his back turned to her, is talking to the blind man, who has his hands in his pockets, in a manner that suggests that the two of them have been talking for a long time. Rubbing the nape of his neck, her father says something that sounds like ‘It could be’. She is looking straight into the blind man’s face. The bruise is nastier than it had appeared, and there is a cut in the middle of it. Her father says her name, she thinks, but in a tone that tells her nothing, then the blind man moves his head slightly, somehow aware of her presence. The movement alerts her father, who turns round. ‘Stephanie,’ he says. He reaches out a hand and lets it fall. ‘Let me introduce you to Mr Morton,’ he says, as if Mr Morton were a local celebrity. ‘This is Mr Morton. And this is my daughter, Stephanie.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Stephanie,’ says Mr Morton, pronouncing her name in such a way that it sounds respectful, almost like a title, and doesn’t irritate her as it usually does. She takes the hand he raises towards her and he holds it for longer than a handshake, his fingers pulsing slightly. ‘You’re thinking: who’s been beating him up?’ he says, touching gingerly the bruise above his eye.
‘Something like that,’ she replies, though in fact she was wondering what her father was saying before she arrived, if Mr Morton can see anything at all, the outline of her body perhaps, or the colour of her clothes.
‘I had a fall. I look a bit of a mess, I gather.’
From the exploring movement of his eyes, it seems he can see a shadow of her face. He relinquishes her hand gently, like a parent letting go of a child who is learning to swim. ‘A bit,’ she says. ‘Not too bad.’
Mr Morton pats the pockets of his jacket, which droop with the weight of the cas
sette machines. ‘I’ll take my leave,’ he smiles at her father, placing a hand on his elbow.
‘No. No need,’ she tells him. ‘You two carry on.’
‘Lunch?’ her father says. ‘I can’t take more than ten minutes’ break, I’m afraid, but I’ll have sandwiches made for you. Would you like that?’ he asks, as if he’s addressing a twelve-year-old.
‘Not hungry, thanks. Catch you later.’ She takes a half-step sideways, so she is facing Mr Morton. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she says to him.
‘Likewise,’ Mr Morton responds.
‘Six?’ she checks with her father.
‘Six,’ he promises.
At exactly six o’clock David knocks on the door of his office to tell him that Stephanie is waiting. She stands in the middle of the hall, scrutinising the skylight as he approaches her. She is wearing a cropped white vest and a new pair of olive combat pants, which hang on her hips three inches below her navel. Between her feet lies a clear plastic carrier bag, in which are rolled the T-shirt and jeans she was wearing this morning. ‘Ready?’ she says, picking up the bag.
‘You’ve been shopping,’ he remarks. ‘And sunbathing.’
She examines her shoulders, as if she hadn’t noticed the reddened skin before.
‘Overdone it a bit,’ he says, and he touches her lightly, with a single finger, on the outer crest of her collarbone, so she turns enough to show the back of her neck, which has been burned as well, more severely. It occurs to him that this is the first time he has touched her since she was a child. ‘We’ll put something on that as soon as we get home,’ he tells her.
‘Yeah. Thanks,’ she says, pulling aside a strap of her vest to compare the uncovered strip of skin with the rest.
‘Unless you’d like to do something else? We could go out for a meal. Or a film?’
‘No. Let’s go home.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll cook us something nice. Chicken in lemon sauce, with new potatoes and carrots. Does that sound OK?’
‘OK.’
‘A meal at home and we can talk some more. Your stuff’s in the car,’ he says, taking the carrier bag from her as he walks towards the door.
She seems to have enjoyed her afternoon in the town. Without being asked she tells him about the scatty girl in the shop where she bought the vest, and the peculiar sculpture of the Holy Family she found in the church in the High Street, and the view from the hill above the bypass, from where she could just make out a person walking around the garden of the Oak, very slowly, so it was probably Mr Morton. She talks about the pool, and asks if she can come up to the hotel for a swim tomorrow.
At home, pressing a cold flannel to her burned shoulder, she smiles at him in the bathroom mirror, yet the unpacking of her bag somehow takes an hour, and when she comes downstairs she goes straight into the living room to watch TV rather than join him in the kitchen. They eat at the kitchen table. He puts a small glass of wine beside her plate. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he says.
‘My word is my bond,’ she declares, one hand raised like a witness in court. They barely talk during the meal. He tells her about Mr Morton’s poet, but she seems uninterested. The silence condenses in the air around them, like an invisible gas. They clear the table and wash up together. Stephanie speaks only to ask where things should go. He winks at her reflection in the window, but she is looking through the glass, not at it.
They sit at opposite ends of the settee, watching a documentary about wildlife in South America. Minuscule frogs, as bright as sapphires, crawl up leaves that resemble slivers of emerald glass; butterflies with wings of translucent ultramarine fly limpingly from flower to flower; two vicuña stand in a blizzard, their fur hung with divots of ice in layers, like fir cones of ice. ‘Unbelievable,’ Stephanie murmurs.
‘Amazing,’ he agrees.
Ancient tortoises totter across an expanse of scrubby grass; iguanas gape at the surf, and suddenly Stephanie says, in the manner of someone recalling some triviality that should have been mentioned earlier, ‘Did she tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’
‘About her dad?’
‘No.’
‘Oh,’ she comments, nodding her head slightly, apparently deciding she should not be surprised. As a commercial break begins, she says: ‘He died.’
Expecting more, he says nothing, but Stephanie does not continue. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ he prompts her. ‘When?’
‘Early last year.’ She squints at the television, as if straining to read small text. ‘Eighteen months ago, nearly.’
‘What happened?’
‘Cancer. Lung cancer,’ she says, watching condors skating on the air between steeples of bare rock. ‘Happened very fast. We came over, Mum and me. Got there just in time.’
‘She didn’t tell me.’
‘No. But you didn’t like him much, did you?’ she remarks, as though talking about an estrangement rather than a death.
‘We weren’t exactly close, but it was more the other way round. He didn’t like me much.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Definitely.’
She glances at him. ‘Why’s that?’ she asks, returning to the screen.
‘I wasn’t the preferred candidate.’
‘For what?’
‘For your mother.’
‘There was a rival?’
‘There was.’
‘Name?’
‘Gerald. Gerald Pargeter. Saltburn’s top solicitor. Or was going to be, once he was through with university.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘We were at school together. A bright boy, very serious, very strong-willed. No oil painting, but he knew what he wanted from life. From the age of about five,’ he continues, but still she will not openly give him her attention. ‘He was determined to serve the forces of law and order, and to earn big money and to own a big house. His father bought him a bright red MG when he got his degree. And a matching pair of driving gloves.’
‘And Mum went out with him?’ Stephanie protests, miming a retch of disgust.
‘God Almighty, no. Despite Gerald’s best efforts. A card every birthday and every Christmas for three or four years. And a Valentine card, of course. Signed,’ he adds, raising his eyes in disbelief, at which Stephanie shakes her head in scorn for hopeless Gerald. ‘Your grandparents had visions of a church wedding, but your mother let the side down. Went for the hotel manager’s son and got married in a registry office on a Saturday morning in November. Then took off to Amsterdam. You wouldn’t have caught Gerald going to Amsterdam. Not a chance.’
Stephanie’s gaze pauses on the photograph of herself as a child, with the golden ball. ‘Learn something every day,’ she comments. The credits for the documentary are scrolling down the screen. ‘You mind?’ she says, picking up the remote control.
‘And the lesson we learn from this tale?’ he asks her.
Theatrically nonplussed, she ruminates on the question. ‘Don’t listen to your parents?’ she suggests.
‘No. The story of Gerald is proof that money isn’t the thing with your mother.’
Her tongue moves inside her cheek, probing, as if winkling out a pellet of food. ‘Wasn’t the thing,’ she corrects him, and gives a little snort, perhaps at what she is watching. In the main square of a Greek island town, in front of a busy open-air taverna, a gang of young English tourists lie flat on their backs, shoulder to shoulder, singing as a wine bottle passes up and down the line. In the background a girl has hitched her sarong round her waist and lowered her knickers for the camera. ‘God,’ sighs Stephanie. It could be Kate’s voice. ‘Pond life,’ she says, but she keeps watching, or pretending to watch, and he thinks of the last time he saw Kate’s parents. She had argued with them in the afternoon, and in the evening there was a loud disagreement with her mother. She slammed the door of the front room, and when he went in to see her she was sitting on the floor, crying, while Stephanie was at the window
, looking a little like she does now, pretending to watch what was happening in the street. He crouched beside Kate, taking a hand. It was something that she or her mother had said that had upset her, he thought, but that wasn’t it.
ten
Stephanie sits at the kitchen table in her father’s house, her head cupped in her hands and her elbows on the table, looking down on the sheet of headed paper on which her father has written a description of the walk to the hotel. It fills most of the page, in blocks of handwriting so regular you’d think it was a page of a novel he’d copied out for framing. ‘If you go straight ahead here (don’t turn into Pollard Lane) you’ll come to Mallin Road fifty yards on,’ she reads. ‘Galton Road is the more direct route, but it’s a very busy road, with a very narrow verge, so you’re better off sticking to Pollard Lane. It’s only three or four minutes longer, and it’s a nicer walk.’ He’s accounted for every set of traffic lights and every junction along the way, but there’s no need for all this fuss: she can remember how they got here, and even if she couldn’t it would be easy to work it out. A child could work it out: open the door and follow the traffic. Scanning her father’s instructions, she sighs with annoyance, but she is not annoyed. She is making an effort to be annoyed, because what she is really feeling is sadness, a deepening sadness, precipitously deepening. As she looks at the page of copperplate handwriting, at the tiny knots and the poppy-seed dots, she can picture him at this table this morning, with his pad of paper and his fountain pen, carefully writing these instructions, and she is saddened by the thought of her father writing to her, thinking that she was still asleep, and by the fact that she has no affection for him, only this feeble sorrow. ‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ the note begins. But she was not asleep. She had heard his fingernails drumming lightly on the door, at half past seven and again at eight. She had heard him moving around the house, getting ready for work; she had heard the floorboards creak on the landing and seen the sheet of paper emerging beneath the door. Only when she heard the car start did she pick up the note. Holding it, she felt as guilty as she had felt the night before, when he put the photograph in her hand and told her about the ball she was holding in the picture and the shop where they bought it, and she put it back on the sideboard, saying her mother had told her all about the shop full of gold things, which wasn’t true. For some reason she had pretended that the photograph and the story didn’t interest her, but on the other hand she had pretended to be interested when he was going on about the man in the portrait, and hadn’t said what she was thinking when he called him a visionary, which was ridiculous, as if running a hotel is like being a poet. This could be her mother’s house, she thinks, looking at the tile-effect flooring, the rack of mugs, the calendar with two days ringed in red, the wine glasses arrayed in straight lines behind a pane of spotless glass. This could be her mother’s house, if Robert had less money.
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