“I do,” emerged from Jack as a sort of anguished hiccup. “I really must . . . I have to . . . I should apologise.” He snatched at her wrist. “Please don’t tell him. Will you?”
“Tell me what?”
Jack’s grasp leaped away while two other hands slipped to rest on Mary’s shoulders.
Nathan to the rescue—about bloody time. Not that I couldn’t have rescued myself.
A neat relaxation rolled through the muscle in her back: she recognised Nathan’s voice, even if his touch was a little surprising, even if she wasn’t used to him smelling of aftershave, of that particular kind of maleness. She could feel the peculiar weight and vibration of Nathan’s chin resting itself on the crown of her head as he spoke.
“Mm, Jack? Break it to me, I can take it. You’re my editor, aren’t you?— terrible news for me, but I have to say I had already guessed. Is that what you wanted to tell me? Or did you want me to know you’d got rid of your moustache?” The movement of Nathan’s laughter nudged softly at Mary’s back. “You look much better without it. And, by the way, why do people like tennis?”
“Now, Nate, this is hardly the time or the place . . .” Perspiration was oiling from one of Jack’s sideburns and down his cheek—a fat line, gleaming with unease.
“Oh, I think it is, though.”
Jack almost growled, it seemed partly irritated and partly proud. “All right. With pre-emptive apologies to the lady in our midst. People all like tennis because when the players serve they tend to sound very much as if they’ve just come. And then there’s the matter of all those shorts and thighs and knickers and balls—it’s a very sexy game. So now you know.” He cleared his throat. “You didn’t introduce me to your protégée, Nate. You really should have. Safer for all concerned. And much more pleasant.”
Nathan moved to stand with his arm around Mary’s shoulders while Jack winked at her politely. She was beginning to feel slightly besieged, even claustrophobic. Jack continued, discussing her as if she had been a particularly wise investment on Nathan’s part.
“You have a splendid, um . . . splendid person there in your charge, old man. Quite splendid.”
Just to remind them that I can speak . . .
She eased herself free of her minder’s grip. “Thank you. I often think I’m splendid, too, and,” she could feel the word— that word—pushing out, shameless in the air, before she could do anything about it, “and published. I am a published author.”
“Well . . .” Jack winked again, this time at Nathan. “This is, I may say, not entirely surprising,” then shifted his attention to her, “you must come from good stock. Not to mention having talent of your own. My heartiest congratulations.” He darted a kiss to her cheek with a delicacy that surprised her and whispered, “The way you feel now—do enjoy it while it isn’t complicated.” She ducked, almost flinched back.
You sleazy old bugger.
Jack raised his hands in shaky surrender, shook his head. “No, no, no. The way you feel about being published—that feeling—it’s something you should treasure, very pure.” He twitched a smile. “That’s what I meant.”
Mary found herself patting his shoulder, finding the cloth of his jacket surprisingly soft—made for indoor working, gentle skin, unresilient wearing, an easy life. He was a kind of man she wasn’t used to, a kind the club was filled with, and suddenly this made her uncomfortably tired.
I want to go home.
“Nathan?”
He’d stepped slightly aside and was staring at her, an odd, fragile stillness in his face.
She tapped at his palm, repeated, “Nathan? Do you mind if I go now? I think I’ve had . . . all I want of this.”
He stayed still for a breath, then broke into busyness, searching his pockets for nothing much, rubbing at his neck. “Of course, of course. I’ll come with you.”
“You don’t have to. I could get a cab. I have money.”
“I know. But I’m also going—because I’ve had all I want, too. ’Night, Jack.”
The men clapped each other’s hands into an interlocking clasp and Mary left them be.
She picked up her coat and walked out and under the still falling music and rain. Tipping back her head, she could taste the cool of it. In the shadows of the doorway, when she looked back, Nathan and J.D. were shuffling forward, embracing as they went. Then she could see Nathan talking, handing over a slip of paper or an envelope, the nod of Jack’s head and then another longer, tighter hug: both men standing still. Nathan faced over Jack’s shoulder, his eyes closed, his expression one of great content.
And not unlike Mary’s when, later, in her unaccustomed hotel room, she slid right under the heat of a bubbled bath.
That’s that then, really. Here I am, me. The same. Only now I’m a writer.
Blood, heat and nerves sang and creaked lazily in her water-filled ears.
Only I wrote what I wrote a while ago, so I must have been a writer then. If not before. If I am now. And if I am now, then I’ll have to keep on being it now. However you do that . . .
She surfaced with a sealy huff of air.
First thing tomorrow, I’ll phone up the Uncles and say. Call them from here. If that’s not too expensive. From in bed. Call them from in bed and tell them that I’m a writer, that someone else thinks I am, too, and that I’m going to be published. Tell them that.
Mary giggled and then giggled again at the thought of herself—up to her neck in scented water and so happy at such a peculiar, papery thing. She stretched, leaned her neck against the back of the bath and lifted her toes to rest between the taps. Then she cupped one hand to her forehead, thumb and forefinger laid to fit snug at the hairline and gently rubbing, comforting. She would say she had always done this, that it was a gesture of her own making.
Across the Square in one of the apartment blocks, Nathan stood in his darkened window, looking out at others that were lit and cradling his forehead in just the way that Mary did. Because this was his movement, too— his movement and his bloodline’s.
He’d watched it repeat in his father and grandfather, less like a visible gene than a signal, a gift. They’d made a whole alphabet, the family, with their angling of arms, their duration of smiles, their pulling of the soft heart out of bread and the squeezing of it into pills and wafers, smooth on the tongue. They all played with their food, the Stapleses. Their shrugs had, for generations, been slightly too disinterested to be anything but provoking. Their early kisses were often too light. And nevertheless, for generations, they had happily echoed each other and their dead and seen their bodies reflecting in younger and sometimes better flesh.
Nathan watched the night, the scent of Mary still stirring about him when he moved, the shape of her still warm inside his hands, and he braced himself against the salt flare of an unfamiliar thought.
I am enough now, just enough.
“The fucking bastard! The bloody . . . I can’t . . . I don’t even . . . Jesus!”
“Now,” Nathan sat holding on to his table’s edge, aware that it was turning in some way plastic, undependable under his fingers’ clamp and fuss. This was going wrong. Had already gone wrong. All wrong. “You’ll need to . . . please . . . please, calm yourself.”
Jesus, I just, I just. Shit, it shouldn’t be this way.
Eckless stirred in his basket, uneasy, while Nathan watched Mary pace his living room, the sky an unfeeling blank of mist, fixed at the window behind her. She’d folded her arms around herself savagely, letting him see—in case he didn’t know for sure already—that he wouldn’t be able to touch her, that no one would, that anyone might stand observing, but she was doing this alone.
“I can’t believe . . . I mean, do you think it’s true? I can’t . . . how could anyone have done this, been like this? How?”
Her voice was ragged: the sound of it filled his mouth with the wet, metallic taste of injury and he wanted to cry, but couldn’t, wanted to move, but couldn’t, wanted to help his daughter, but could
not. She looked at him, bewildered, enough dismay in her eyes to knock the breath out of his lung and sting his ribs.
“Nathan, do you believe it?”
Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I am such a sorry fuck.
“Well, I . . . it could be. I don’t really—I don’t know.”
He considered the knuckles of his hand and attempted to govern his pulse, while she grabbed at a chair and sat beyond his reach, leant her elbows on the table, let her hands fall, wooden with unhappiness.
She rubbed at her hairline—the family gesture—and closed her eyes. “He says he cares, says he cared. But he didn’t ever write before now—not in all this time, never let me . . . I don’t think it’s him. It isn’t him. My father’s dead, that’s what my mother told me. My father’s dead.”
No, your father wants to be, only wants to be dead.
“Perhaps—”
“Why didn’t he contact me before? He says he, he says he . . .” Her words were beginning to hiccup and break. “Then why didn’t he . . . write? Nathan? Christ, he hasn’t even given a return address.”
The room sunk around him while he stayed still, absolutely still and maintained the crawling tension of a body lie: the calmly concerned surprise in his face, the quiet leaning of his spine against the chair back, nothing about him showing a sign of being sudden or desperate. He answered her carefully with words that felt muted and cottony.
“Perhaps he was afraid.” She snapped round to look at him, entirely incredulous. “I, I don’t know, though. I don’t know . . . anything, except that if he is who he says then I’m sure that, I’m sure that, having known you myself now for some time, I’m sure that he would . . . have feelings. I’m sure that—”
“But I wasn’t even four. At least, I don’t think I was four when he, when he left.”
“He would remember. That would have been enough. To know.” His throat closed at the last syllable and his vision smirred.
Shit.
“And why would she tell me he was dead? Why that?”
He could only shake his head.
Which is pretty surprising, really—having done so much damage already, it’s strange you can’t think of something more hideous to do. Why not just punch her? You might as well.
Shit. It seemed OK, it seemed the best way in the end—J.D. writes the letter, copies out exactly what I gave him—like the good man he can sometimes be—he posts it from Islington and then . . . I thought she’d be pleased. Find out you’ve got a father, find out that he loves you, that he always, always did—that would make you, wouldn’t it, pleased?
She had lowered her head now, one hand nestled over her eyes, so that it didn’t matter if he cried because she wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t know.
Good thing, too—because you’re not crying for her, you’re crying for yourself. She hates him—hates you. Look. Look at what you do to her by simply being you, by simply announcing that you exist.
I did think of explaining properly: I did think about doing that—setting out the whole of the final arrangement with Maura, what it meant—but then I decided I should just say what mattered: that I am somewhere, that I am loving her, that more will follow, if she wants it.
Wrong. All wrong.
He stood—almost surprising himself with the movement, dizzy—and stepped to wait behind her, hoping some change in the fret of her breath, some particular motion of her unease would tell him this was just the time when he could rub at her shoulders, lay his palm on her neck’s heat, be usefully, noticeably, helpfully with her. But nothing altered—he stayed unnecessary.
“Mary. Mary?”
Oh, shut up and leave her alone, can’t you?
No. I can’t.
“Mary, thank you for coming to me with this.”
She steadied a long inhalation. “There’s no one else I can come to.” “Well. I suppose. If you say, then that’s true.”
“I don’t want to worry the Uncles.”
“No. Of course.” Everything he could see had started to slide and spangle from the edges in. “This will be fine, though. It will work out.” She stayed silent while he tried taking frequent shallow breaths for fear of blacking out. “It will.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I . . . No. That’s right. I don’t.”
Nathan hugged himself and felt sweat, came close to staggering when she pushed back her chair to almost clip his shins and walked out: not a word or a look for him. He heard her break into a run outside, her footfalls softened by turf, but still clearly anxious to leave him behind.
For a sickly moment his mind filled with the scent and image of his mother, a memory of her raging at him and—unheard of, this—slapping him inefficiently for some particularly imbecilic crime. He realised strongly that what he wanted most was for her to swoop at him, alive and pallid with anger again today, to clatter him with her forearms and her hands until his marooned lung shuddered and rattled in the over-large bell of his chest. He needed her to hit him unreasonably hard and confirm his total understanding that he was not grown enough to be responsible or capable in any way.
It was a terrible cliché: going to the Lighthouse for help, making a floundering ship of himself and then limping on into safe harbour—but Nathan had exhausted all other options, pretty much. He’d listened to Piaf and Jacques Brel, dredged up some Cajun social music until they sawed out “Un Homme Marié” and reminded him of Maura and his whole fucking, bloody life and everything and then he’d played Philip Glass for mindless hours before the incessant twiddly-diddly of it drove him clear outside. He’d sprinted then with Eckless to the point where both of them were shaking and pole-axed in the chilly grass. He’d watched the sea split and cup and ride itself down, his dog whining in polite concern beside him, trotting up to lick between his fingers, stealing salt.
She hates me.
Mary’s voice was hot in his mind, still hobbling his thoughts and translating them into bleak distances, unexpected hurts. The sea breeze had kicked up a gnawing pressure in his sinuses and he’d attempted to build the consoling fantasy of swinging in the current, dead to all worlds, fish-nibbled and bloated, the skin of his hands slipping off like malignant gloves. It hadn’t worked, so he’d had to come here, to the Lighthouse.
Bloody Christopher, he sets us up for this: the Lighthouse. It couldn’t be the coalhouse, greenhouse, shit-house—no, it has to sound illuminating. We look to the Lighthouse, from whence doth come our aid.
“Nathan, I didn’t expect to see you here.” Ruth burst up from a chair in the darkest corner of Joe’s sitting room, surprising Nathan and reminding him strongly of some medically repellent growth, swelling palely towards a time-lapsed lens.
“Oh, right. Hi. Joe around?”
Ach, shite. Why this morning? Why you?
“No.”
And shite again.
She smiled at him warily and he allowed the bookcase to catch his eye—nothing more convincingly fascinating being available. “Away out then, is he?”
“For a while. He left a note in the kitchen. He was expecting me”—this given the pointed delivery she seemed to hone by another barbed inflection each time they met.
“Whereas I’m not expected at all.” He remembered not to look at her finger stumps—once he’d started doing that, he could never quite stop.
“Well, no. No, you’re not.”
Ruth prodded herself down into the chair again and stared at her knees. Still feeling bloodied after Mary, he found himself moderating his distaste and relenting slightly when he looked at the bow of Ruth’s head. He was suddenly anxious to practise even one unwieldy expression of tenderness, one gesture out of the many he seemed to keep in pointless storage, flaking to dust.
“I, uh . . . Would it be an imposition if I asked to wait?”
She blinked at him, suspicious—as he often was himself—of his courtesy. “Wait if you like. It isn’t my house, I don’t have a say in who stays here.”
“I w
as—” He blocked himself. Primed to talk to someone, he knew he might just go off and blurt out his horrors over anyone instead.
No call to give her ammunition when she can already snipe away without any assistance. Should the mood take her.
Not that, to be honest, she seems in that mood currently. No chucking coppers at my eyes today. And she does look, for wee moments, I have to say, as if she were twelve, or eight, or some age equally unlikely and inappropriate for a woman of her size, but nevertheless unmistakable in its expression of vulnerability. That’s what I most detest about her—the way she’ll make you want to play caretaker for her, the way she’ll be so invitingly sad.
“I was—I’ve had trouble with Mary.”
Why am I saying this?
“It’s all quite difficult. It’s things I’m not good at.”
Why? Because I’d say this to Joe’s desk lamp if I had to. I just want it out and away. Not solved, just away, just for a while.
Ruth chipped in, glumly, “I never had children.”
She always does that—talks about herself in the past tense, as if she was already over. Even I don’t do that.
She folded her arms tightly, inadvertently allowing Nathan to notice she must be wearing too small a bra. Under tensed layers of cloth, the limits of size B containment were plainly impressed on two rises of size D flesh: the outline of her breasts faced him, plump and unnerving, like unhappily transected baps. He made an effort not to find them grimly fascinating, wary of purely professional interest being misconstrued, and jerked back to consider the wreck of his fatherhood. “Well, I haven’t exactly had my child for any length of time.”
“But I’m sure you’re doing what you think is best.”
“Recipe for disaster, every time.”
She gave a not disagreeable chuckle and then shook her head. “I’m sure that isn’t true.”
“But then, you don’t know me very well.”
“No, that’s right, I don’t.”
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