A mildly electric silence began to strap itself out between them and Nathan scuffled his feet, burning off a number of seconds in which he could think what he should do. “You know—” He turned and faced her with, perhaps for the first time, his entire attention. And there she was: Ruth Alvey, reeking with loneliness, eyes frozen for however many years in a type of perpetual flinch and with odd varieties of anger, keeping up a twitch and snag in her lips.
You don’t notice, because of the way she is, that she does have a fine mouth: essentially sensual. Shame.
Nathan watched her, watching him, and knew that, in other circumstances, this might conceivably be the beginning of something. But with this particular Nathan Staples and this particular Ruth Alvey, here on Foal Island on this particular afternoon—or, let’s face it, in any other place or time—this was the beginning of nothing, nothing at all.
“Ruth . . .”
She adjusted the collar of her uncomplimentary blouse, pulled it a fraction further clear of her uncomplimentary sweatshirt. The air around him seemed to kick softly, like the surface of dark water, disturbed. His prick woke with a minor caterpillar spasm of unease.
“Ruth . . .”
At the backs of his knees and in the taut line of his neck, he recognised the instinctive creep of free-floating need, untimely as ever.
Lonely people, dry people, people who would prefer to be untroubled by any more hope: they really ought to fit. It should be possible to match them together quite arbitrarily: two minuses making a plus, two unloveds making love: but, of course, it doesn’t work that way. Despair doesn’t lead to compromise, that’s what makes it so despairing.
Slick and limber, like a mist against his skin, came the memory of forming an embrace: the second-nature daily ease of that and of drawing in air to the crest of a breath, the turn of a breath, and then holding, squeezing Maura fast against him while he sighed away his brain and his heart unbolted fearlessly and everything was fine.
I know exactly what I want and nothing else will ever do.
And Ruth, I suppose, I hope, thinks much the same.
He glanced away, broke their contact, and discovered he was feeling seasick and a touch unclean.
“Ruth?”
A dusty flare of warmth showed in her face before she could smother it.
“I . . .” He rubbed at his cheek with the heel of one hand. Under his palm, a muscle began to tick. “I think it’s best if I left this till later. I’ll come back when Joe isn’t busy.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Mainly, I needed the walk—you know? Here and back? It’s done me the world of good. Really. So I’d better head off. And,” he measured the words out, careful they should have no more meaning than he meant, “it was nice to see you.”
“OK, Nathan.” Ruth nodded, gave a bruised grin, as if she’d just heard a bad joke at her expense—the one that she’d been expecting all along. “Nice to see you, too.” Her voice emptied to grey.
“Yeah. Take care.” Which sounded to Nathan the most stupid thing he could ever have thought of to say.
At first Mary couldn’t think of what was missing, of what small thing was gone. Morgan lay, as he always liked to, in the middle of the bed—a terrible, greedy sleeper, that’s what Bryn called him.
Morgan’s usual range of nonsense was set on the cabinet, waiting for the night’s possibilities: small inhaler, luminous alarm clock, folded handkerchief, two peppermints, a water glass, the tub of Vaseline. His clothes were draped ready across the chair, his shoes settled underneath it. His favourite picture of Mary was leant on the mantelpiece where he would see it if he just sat straight up and looked straight ahead. Things were as they should be, very orderly, the bedroom full of the dry, sleek scent of Bryn and Morgan, Morgan and Bryn: their blankets, their sleeping, their skin.
She looked at Morgan again, slowly, avoiding the brief, tender fan of his red hair, perfectly legible against the pillow’s white, trying to slip her gaze over the soft close of his eyelids, the hard gape of his mouth.
No.
Bryn, she knew, was behind her: more ready for this by now and perhaps more accustomed. Mary reached out one hand to him and, almost at once, Bryn burrowed it safe between both of his own. Neither Bryn nor Mary spoke.
No.
And then she realised what was gone, what her eye couldn’t help expecting, even in the teeth of common sense. There was no more rise and fall in Morgan’s chest.
Look at him.
No, I don’t have to.
I don’t know what I’ll see.
But, of course, she did have to look.
She stood, sensations bleeding away, her body becoming a kind of pause, and she looked at a face close to being his face, but entirely strange. And the dark of one smooth thought began to pierce her, gently irresistible: she wasn’t seeing him any more, she was seeing it. This theft of Morgan, his replacement with something false—she tried to believe that it meant he’d had a soul, a soul that had moved him, a soul that had left her behind now while it turned and settled, still living, in an unthinkable elsewhere.
She had never thought of death before as such a closed and selfish space. And she had never thought that absolute absence would offer such a savage consolation: this lunge of bloodied faith, choking her with a need to believe in continuance, in life after life, before her confidence failed her and abandonment spindled out, cutting everything to weeping threads.
But in the undefended corner of her eye, the soft back to her mind, she was still waiting to see him breathe, still knew that he would breathe, was still quite certain that he would breathe. Or else why continue to love him, why be unable to call a halt? Why let herself be tipped into a future charred and silted with emotions which already had no point? For the first time in her adult life, Mary understood she’d made too many plans.
“You don’t have to, if you don’t want.” Bryn’s voice sounded improbably, garishly alive. “I already started, I could go on . . .”
His hands pressed hers and then he held her, arms needy, his breath breaking in her hair. She hugged him back. “No, I’ll do it. We’ll do it together. So they don’t have to.”
“They wouldn’t—” He drew in a tentative measure of air, shifting against her delicately. “They wouldn’t do it right. Not the way he’d like it.”
“No, not the way he’d like.”
So they parted and faced Morgan and did what their separate loves required.
Mary padded round the bed—as if here she might still be able to trouble a sleep—and lifted the whole armful of his clothes, lifted the feel and smell of him in one cool and insubstantial weight and carried it to the bed. Where Bryn had quietly drawn the covers back to show her Morgan, his skin blue-pale as watered milk and his limbs too thin; Morgan, for both of them, lovely, only ever beautiful. Morgan’s body wore his black dress socks, a fresh white vest and boxer shorts in dove grey silk.
Bryn’s eyes ticked to her. “He loved silk, the bad man. And I always liked grey.” The horror of his own likings and what they now meant snatched his voice and left him swallowing, frowning gently, quiet. Then he extended his open hands to Mary, steadier, ready to begin.
She passed him a new white shirt and, while he struggled with its wrapper, she set Morgan’s things at the foot of the bed and moved in closer. Then, one on either side of Morgan—his overly heavy head, his too-light limbs, the terribly meaningless touch of his skin—they dressed him.
“Handkerchief, he’d have a handkerchief.”
“But in the trouser pocket, not the breast.”
Remembering him back to life.
“That’s right.”
They made themselves busy fulfilling the needs he no longer had.
“That collar, it’s too big. I should take it back . . .”
“It’s fine.”
“He never wore a tie, nearly never.” Bryn gave a tiny huff of concern and then pursed his lips, trying to stem his usual sounds of unhappines
s. They were inadequate.
“I know.”
“He looks better with one on, though. I always said so, but he wouldn’t be told.”
“He looks—”
But she couldn’t think how Morgan looked. Except that, dressed, he was both closer and further from himself. Still, she wanted him, more than anything, to be handsome and comfortable. Mary wanted to know for sure that he was completely comfortable.
Bryn brushed Morgan’s hair, fastened on the wristwatch and eased the arms to a proper rest.
She felt herself say, “His reading glasses.”
Bryn seemed bewildered for a space, almost afraid, but then moved to the dresser, opened a drawer and there were the glasses, among the socks. “I just . . . put them in the first place I could . . .”
“I know, I know.”
They met each other’s eyes, surprised again by the newness, the headiness of their pain.
Morgan’s inside pocket took the glasses and all was made straight, tugged and tucked and smoothed, and then Bryn and Mary stood, suddenly smothering inside the certainty that this had been everything there was to do.
Later, Mr. Howells would come with the coffin—they didn’t have to say this, it was understood—but Bryn would stay with Morgan until that happened, he would keep watch. Alone. So Mary kissed the body that had been Morgan and told it goodbye, then she kissed Bryn, lightly, lightly. Both of them shivered at the touch of warm lips.
“He read your story, the one about the hand. They publish it yet?”
“Not yet, no.”
“He thought it was very good.”
“Mh hu.”
“So did I. Proud of you. Both of us. Proud.”
She let go of Bryn’s hand as she moved towards the bedroom doorway and didn’t want to hear about stories, or writing, or the way she’d abandoned Gofeg and the people that she loved for a great deal of typing, a great deal of paper and dead ink.
Mary eased the door closed and crossed the landing, careful not to hear Bryn sobbing, the soft, deep impacts of grief.
And when everything important had already been done, Mary attended the funeral service of Cyril Iolo Morgan, a man who had been her uncle by mutual consent. Howells the son drove the hearse and Howells the father walked in front, and both took responsibility for moving Bryn and Mary between the crowds, the quiet jostle of condolence, the unrehearsed theatre of it all. Beside Mary in the chapel, Bryn could sing none of the hymns he’d chosen. She put her arm around him and felt the jolts of misery, wrenching silently under his back.
But they got through, finally staggering a little like marathon runners approaching the end of their course. They made it home. Back to a house full of loping shadows, stabs of memory, and the paralysing reassurances of strangers. Mary wandered the afternoon away in a house made not their own, crowded with the dark of mourners, the susurration of their proper concern and the guilty crack of their laughter, that healthy, pointless noise.
Every conceivable surface was unruly with plates. Mary drifted to a stop in the kitchen doorway, mildly confounded by the impenetrable clutter of sandwiches and pork pie slices, napkins and cakes and glasses, tea-cups and unsteady, dirty knives. Someone passed behind her and she felt the now usual nudge and stammer of acknowledgement at her elbow.
“We saw him off well.”
“Yes.”
They all said that, or something to that effect. As if there had been the possibility of seeing him off badly, with hatred, with contempt.
But I suppose it happens—sometimes it must.
This isn’t for him, though, is it? This is for them, to see him off, to be seen well.
Danno Buys and Sells Anything, Mrs. Danno, the Cennards, Dilwyn Ianetta and all of his tribe, there were so many people here, so many mercifully indistinct faces, as if she were seeing them at speed, or through a barrier of salted glass.
And Mrs. Davies, Jonathan’s mother, had turned up for a while. Mary was sure she remembered a thin kiss at her cheek and then the back of a pious raincoat making for the door, duty done.
“That story, Mary . . .”
Irene and Mildred from the hosiery shop caught Mary in at either shoulder and steered her along the passage towards the front room.
“Poor Morgan showed us.”
So he’s poor Morgan now.
“Clever old thing, you are, aren’t you? He never stopped telling us.”
Their voices pecked at her, left and right.
“Just stopping by in the mornings and telling us all about it—how you were getting on.”
Not this, not now.
“So pleased when you were published, he was.”
“I’m not yet.”
“But you are going to be, he explained.”
“You made him very happy.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t. Not enough.”
They clutched at her, all soft arms and softer bodies, while she cried, suddenly caught by a vaulting hurt. She gasped inside their little atmosphere of 4711 and inquisitive kindness and lily of the valley talc.
“You’ll be fine, lovely.”
“And if you need anything ever, you just ask.”
“Write to us,” Irene suggested, her eyes faintly anxious to make the right offer, to indicate securely that everything would go on, that Mary should do what Mary did best and that time would move forward: this being a process requiring no consent.
“Yes, do,” Mildred scooped up the inspiration with relief, “do that,” before they dabbed her with kisses and steered themselves away to the shuffle of conversations near the sideboard. The clock chimed its first quarter after four and Mary wished them all gone, every one.
Except for Jonathan.
She only knew for sure that she’d been waiting for him when he was standing there.
“I’m sorry I missed the . . . I only heard last night.” He brought in the damp of the afternoon, pearled in his hair, and slipped chill fingers quick against her palm, the unforeseen man: Jonathan. “You didn’t think I’d stay away?”
She could feel him assessing her expression and was powerless to know what he’d find, how she looked, what she thought.
“I mean, as soon as I—I’m very, very sorry—he was such a . . .”
All around them, the house’s attention was audible. Sticky little currents of curiosity were already trying to eddy them closer and then witness the return of . . .
What? What do they think will happen? What do they think we can be? God, Jonno, what am I . . . what are we supposed to do?
“It is good to . . .” Rather than finish the sentence, she moved inside his arms, accepted the rain-frosted give of his coat against her cheek, then the nudge of foreheads, his hands at the small of her back while the hunger for comfort screamed in her blood like a circular saw.
Because she was like all the other mourners, really just the same: they were each one of them avid for life, heat, touch, for any indication that good could come of this. Any sign of youth, of liveliness was being coddled up today with an almost unbearable, angry appetite. Children were being pointedly indulged, unremarkable babies passed in wonder from lap to lap, anything would do, any temporary foxing of loss.
“This is—” Her voice seemed unpleasantly intrusive, so she pressed away her sentence as they gathered each other in.
“Come on. Come outside.”
“Mm?”
“Just come on. I haven’t got long.”
“What?”
“I haven’t got—” He kissed her hair and the room gave a small inhalation of approval. “Come on.”
Jonno led her through the house, it seemed, for hours, while she gazed at his cheek, his mouth, the loose thread on the collar button of his shirt, and wondered if he was absolutely, genuinely there. Far below her thinking, her body was being drawn into an edgy run, as they stumbled to catch each other’s pace, dodged furniture and observers, broke out through the kitchen into the good, cool prickle of outside air. The
n they clasped together again beside the back door, a robin watching them from the wall, unwilling to sing.
“Now then, let’s have some sense.” His first kiss opened on her, tested and parted her teeth with his tongue, pushed her into an old dream she’d thought she wouldn’t see again. They fell into the old silk pattern of flutter and flex and tense, the breaks and beats of feeding. And she did want this. She did, very naturally, want this—but not in one hard crush, while his fingers unfastened her jacket and one hand worked around, puckering up her skirt until he could palm at her knickers and then slip in, as if this was his body as much as hers. Which wasn’t true, which wasn’t true.
He tried for a firmer contact, running the obvious furrow, while a mist of rain dampened the backs of her legs, chilled her fully into her senses again.
“No.”
“Mm.” He was trying to ignore the resistance in her thighs, her arms fending off now, thumping.
“No.”
He swung back from her, wiped his mouth with his hand and was held for an instant by the scent of her, fresh. He paused, almost started back to her, but then caught her eye and folded his arms instead. “Well, fuck, what the bloody hell do you want? Jesus, I was trying to make you happy, I came to make you happy. When I saw you, the way you looked—sad—I thought—”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t think.”
He dropped his head, appeared to be listening for something interior, some private advice. Then he scowled out, “My mistake then, eh? Forgot what you were like there, for a minute,” already turning, buttoning his coat, clawing his hair back into order, “but I won’t forget again,” and striding for the gate, grabbing it open and shoving it closed behind him. A sliver of old paint dropped from the hinge. Mary went and retrieved it, unthinking, and crushed it in her hand until it splintered, hurt her palm. Jonathan reached the lane’s end, turned and paced out of sight.
Inside, the house was emptying: people off home, or up to the pub. Some of the women had stayed behind and were tidying and washing up.
But what about this evening? Without the mess to deal with, what’ll we do?
Bryn stood, halfway down the stairs, staring at something above the movements of the house, as if he’d only just been lifted down from a hilltop, some scything perspective he’d been surveying, a place to still the bone. He was elegantly motionless, only the sheen of his eyes trembling faintly, broken, the rest of him dapper and dashing and pinned to a moment outside any moment she could reach. Mary had never seen him look so fine and so terrifying. Old Carmon had given him a haircut this morning and a proper barber’s shave to clean and pink his skin. He seemed very well. He gleamed. His throat was delicate and smooth above the stiff white fit of a new shirt, the twin of Morgan’s. The one that had gone with Morgan to the grave. He was wearing his best suit—heavy wool, brushed and pressed to a perfect darkness—and shoes with a shine like new oil and the proper clapping ring of leather about them to sound out, whenever he stepped.
Everything You Need Page 27