From the next room, Nathan heard the shunt of chair legs and solid, measured footfalls; a polite, introductory clearing of the throat. He needed no more clues than that. “Good evening, Joe. What can I do you for?”
Joe leaned against the kitchen door frame, head tilted enquiringly, and Nathan fought the immediate, irresistible urge to trust in him, to confide. The teapot was cosied and steaming on the kitchen table and, doubtless, the fire had been lit in the living room and the whole building suffused, one way or another, with the type of serenity that would unbutton the sternest resolve and have Nathan setting out his heart’s small secrets as if they were a handful of spare change. He nodded and shrugged. “Tea in the pot for me, is there, Joe?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And then we’ll go through and talk, will we?”
“While I’m here, Nate. Might as well.”
“Mary said you should come and see me, then, did she?”
“And I’d been thinking that I might in any case—while I was passing.”
“We’d better get on with it, then, if that suits you?”
“That suits me fine.”
Joe disappeared back into the living room while Nathan poured a cup of tea and then trudged in after him with the air of a man heading off to the dentist’s chair.
“No need to be quite so glum, though, Nathan. I’m only here to say hello.”
“In your capacity as Chairman of the Fellowship.”
“And in my capacity as your friend. And Mary’s friend. What did you do in London?”
“I viewed the body.” Nathan felt himself grin and wondered why. “That’s what I did. All right? Jack’s body—I went and saw it, because he wanted me to. And it didn’t tell me a thing. I already knew that dead is dead.”
“It must have had some effect, though, surely. It filled you with the urge to start fencing as soon as you got back.”
Nathan pressed himself into his chair and folded his arms. He was too tired to be doing this and too tired to resist it. He knew that he could stay silent for as long as he liked, but Joe would still sit and be patient and ready to hear. It wasn’t even that Nathan might not have chosen to talk to Joe eventually, he simply objected to being steamrollered like this.
Joe nipped in with an opening before Nathan was quite ready. “I know you’d rather speak to Jack. I realise that.”
“That’s . . .”
“Below the belt?”
“Yes. Something like that, anyway. Look, I just . . .” Nathan could feel it: the sad, little crumple of his resistance, the vaguely masochistic fumbling for comfort. God, sometimes he made himself sick. “I don’t have a problem with death. No more than anyone else has. My problem is living. That’s what I saw when I looked at Jack—that’s the kind of total selfishness I have. I look at my dead friend and all I want to do is understand why, if his death is so absolute, my life can’t be absolute, too. I want to know why I can’t be wholly living. Christ, it would take so little, so fucking little to do it, to let me be here properly. Joe, it would only take her. Just her. After all of this time, it’s still her.
“And don’t say that I shouldn’t look for contentment outside myself. Don’t fucking say it, because no one who fucking suggests that knows the first fucking thing about being lonely. A human fucking being cannot do everything entirely fucking alone, we’re not made to be sealed units, we’re meant to look outside ourselves, we’re meant to find joy in that. If there’s a God, he fucking made us that way. And don’t even start to tell me that was a loving act.
“Joe, one hour with her—one hour with Maura—I would still give—I would give everything I have for that. That’s the kind of fucking cliché I’ve been for all these years. Jack asked me to write this bloody novel, so I’m doing it—but you know why I stopped in the first place, why I gave it up, stopped writing books I believed in? Because those ones had to be for her, because I simply couldn’t make them happen without her. Even the pulp I wrote . . . because it was aimed at women, because it got me into magazines, into the colour supplements, I always thought well, maybe she’ll read something—maybe she’ll hear about me, see my photograph, maybe she will just fucking come back and visit me, only visit me once, nothing more than that.
“But I’m doing what I said I would because that’s all that I have left of myself—that I keep my fucking word. I’m writing this new thing and I’m trying to believe in it and I’m trying to make it good, but nothing has changed. I might as well never have stopped. Every page that I write of it, all I do is think about her. Doing this isn’t worth it without her. Nothing is.
“I went into that anatomy room, Joe, and I understood how wonderful I am, what a beautiful fucking thing. I know that. And I know that I have no purpose, I have no point.”
“Mary would disagree.”
Nathan was going to cry. “I love Mary.” He could feel the sick cloy of betrayal as he spoke, “I do love her,” and understood that his love for his daughter and her love for him were not enough. “She’s made these last years more possible than I could ever have imagined and I wish that I could have been her father earlier, I wish I could have been there when she genuinely needed me, but now she doesn’t.”
“That’s ridiculous. And you know it.”
By this time he was crying, could feel the tears, had to blink the room into focus, tasted salt when he licked his lips. “She’s a grown woman now and she’s a writer. I’m not exactly indispensable any more. And she has Jonno.”
“You and Jonathan are not mutually exclusive.”
“Joe. You know what I mean. Leave it. I feel the way I feel and I know what I know. Anyway, you’ve said it yourself—Mary will be all right, whatever happens: she’s special. She was in a car crash in the womb and she didn’t die, she was born prematurely and she didn’t die, she choked on—if I remember—a butter bean and I spun her round by the heels like a fucking lamb and forced it out of her and she didn’t die, only looked at me with more trust than I’d thought I could tolerate and then there was the bee sting in her throat and . . . and . . . she’s survived everything. You know and I know that she’s already been through all seven of our steps without even thinking about it. Without any planning and without any doubt, she has her life absolutely. So either you believe what you’ve been preaching all these years, or you think she needs me.”
“Nathan, when you’re like this, there’s no persuading you of anything. She’s certainly a remarkable young woman, very blessed, but she still needs a whole variety of things, including you. I need you, for that matter.”
Something about this cracked a sob through Nathan, set him clinging and wheezing around each breath. He could no longer speak.
“Nate, I know that you won’t want to hear this, but there are other people who have other misfortunes. To take one example, you can see your daughter almost every day—every time I want to bring my daughter out here I have to enter into negotiations with her mother. The bargaining hasn’t exactly got any easier since Sophie’s accident at the pool. And I can’t say that I especially long for my ex-wife, but I do remember what having the physical love of a woman was like. I do recall the giving and receiving of consensual delight. I do miss that. I may live a meditative life, but I’m not a saint, Nathan, I’m not anything approaching that.”
Joe got to his feet and began to pace, obviously finding it difficult to talk about this and stay still. “You say you’re finding the book hard; well, I do feel for you in that. But try to remember, Nate, I gave up writing completely. And I loved it as much as my daughter, as much as my wife. But I gave it up. Everyone round here acts as if that was an easy decision, as if it’s all in the past now and gone. And yes, in a way, I do still write in my mind—in a way, I simply forgo the setting down of words. And I have my prayers and I have the joy of seeing other writers come here and rediscover their abilities and then leave me, better able to create, or stay with me and help make a community. But I have seen writers die here. And, however much
it was their own decision to try the risk of that, I cannot help but feel responsible. I live with that. I live with that and I live with the knowledge that I can’t ever write for them—for anyone—that I can’t ever write about or for anything. All of my words die within sight of me, all of them are transient. You want to be dead, Nathan? Almost everyone thinks I am dead. Because I don’t write. And a writer who doesn’t write—what’s that if it’s not dead?
“So when you’re considering your miseries, Nate, maybe take a pause to consider mine.” Joe walked to the window and halted, his back to the room. Nathan could hear the tensed rush of his breathing.
Nathan, still crying, “I’m sorry,” trying his best to make sense, “I’m so sorry,” weeping now with shame and self-disgust. “Sometimes I don’t think.”
Joe stayed at the window, motionless.
“Almost always, I don’t think.” Nathan pushed himself out of his chair and went to stand behind his friend, to hold his shoulders, to rest his forehead against his back. “Almost always, I don’t think. You said I should come here to get things right with myself and I haven’t, I haven’t changed at all.”
For a space that Nathan couldn’t judge, they said and did nothing more. Then slowly Nathan moved to look over Joe’s shoulder, to see the night through the glass and their faces shining on it, both of them looking less than their best—two tired men, not happy, and the dark. He hoped that this wasn’t the whole of the truth, he hoped this wasn’t all there was to them.
Joe patted him on the hand and then shifted to the side, faced him. “No need to be worried about me, Nathan. Not really.” Again a pat, this time at Nathan’s arm. “Thank you for listening.”
“Don’t be so fucking reasonable.”
“You know me, I see no point in being otherwise: it just wastes so much time.”
Nathan gave a little huff, approaching a laugh, “That’s one explanation, yes,” and went towards the kitchen. “You want some more tea now?”
“If you feel like tea yourself.”
“I feel like a drink myself.”
“We’ll have a drink then.”
Nathan, already veering towards the whisky shelf, “Yes, why not.” It surprised him that his hands were shaking slightly when he poured the measures out and that he felt, in some degree, lighter, but also more bereft.
“Nate, could I ask you something?”
“If you absolutely must.”
“Would you say that you were, in any way, a desperate man?”
“I would say, fuck off.” Nathan, not having lost it thus far, briefly wondered if he soon might.
“No, tell me, Nathan, it’s important. Would you say you were a desperate man?”
“Of course I fucking would.”
“And that would, naturally, mean you are aware that desperation can create a kind of freedom, a certain strength: acknowledged, accepted, it can lead to almost anything.”
“What are you telling me, Joe?”
“Perhaps something you wanted to hear.”
They drank together gently after that: enjoying the drowse of each other’s silences, or discussing harmless things until a couple of hours had passed and Joe set off back to the Lighthouse with a quiet goodbye and a short, hard hug. Then Nathan sat on alone, cradling the balance of his future in the light of another glass.
A desperate man—eh, Joe? A desperate fucking man. Just like on the wanted posters. Approach with extreme caution—a desperate man. I should get that printed on a T-shirt, or maybe a badge for my lapel: more age-appropriate. Then again, anyone with any sense can simply read it in my face.
And something must be done about it.
He frowned laboriously: whisky had slowed the muscles in his face, really rather soothingly, he thought.
Something must, very definitely, be done.
Bed now, though—go to bed first. And then possibly even sleep.
Nathan said this would happen and I didn’t believe him. Christ.
Mary rolled carefully on to her side and decided not to examine the alarm clock—it was the middle of the night, that was all that she needed to know. To her left Jonno was still and sleeping, the shape of his weight a completely familiar pattern tugged softly into her half of the mattress. And she knew his breathing, knew his resting heat, knew that if she inched out her hand, she would find the smooth small of his back, the angle above his hip, the need to turn and work her way to fit against him, wake him up. And she knew she wouldn’t reach and wouldn’t touch him and hadn’t woken with a thought of him in her head.
I honestly thought Nate was joking, being metaphorical, or something.
She’d snapped back into consciousness, a patter of excitement already disturbing her blood: a particular, private kind of happiness.
It would work. It would bloody work. I’d just have to put in another section before the last and then I could get away with it. The whole thing might even look as if I’d planned it.
It was the novel. When she’d got into bed, she hadn’t known how to end it and now she did. The solution would be tricky, but not impossible, by any means. In fact, it had a surprising elegance—something she’d never suspected of herself.
God, this is appalling.
She absolutely needed to write. The desire to just get up and do it ached and rubbed in her as firmly and seductively as Jonno had ever done. So, as Nathan had predicted, she lay as motionless as she could beside the person she probably loved most in the world, certainly wanted most in the world, while her nerves seethed with the lack of an altogether different type of love.
It is good, though. He didn’t say it was this good.
She resisted the urge to get up and work, to make even a single note.
That’s the kind of thing Nathan would do—run away from a person and on to the page. But I won’t. This is OK. It’s just a writing thing, a writer’s thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean something bad—only that I’ve started to be a writer, even in my sleep.
The idea of this made her smile.
And I can at least share the feeling, because that would be the proper thing to do. We can both have a nice time with it.
Which meant that she tumbled Jonathan on to his back.
“Mm?”
“Ssh.”
Then she dived down and kissed him close to his navel while he mumbled awake and his hands found her neck, her hair, her head as it nuzzled in to let her sigh between his hips: brush, lick and lift where he was soft, suck him free from every dream until he straightened for her, borrowed her beat and pushed back at her, thick.
They didn’t take long and were, perhaps, unusually fierce. Then Mary let him be with a final, tiny purse of her lips, made him shudder in a way she liked.
“What was all that about?” He stroked her shoulders, waited until she surfaced again. “Mary?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Mm, well. It’s practically time to wake up . . .” Kissing her mouth and smiling at the taste of himself there. “Work in the morning.”
“Same thing for me.” She turned and let him fold himself against her back, his arms already gently clumsy again with drowsiness.
Yes, indeed, work in the morning. Back to the island and get right down to it, take it all the way.
The memory of his sweat pressed to her face, of him braced and pinned against her, fluttered in the pit of her stomach and sleeked in beside the raw tick of syllables, waiting: the anxious flex of ready words.
And if it hadn’t seemed overly intimate to mention, Nathan could have told her about this, too—the author’s unique capacity to commit almost entirely invisible infidelities.
Mary had news that wouldn’t wait. “Nathan.” News he’d be just the man to understand. She’d wanted to tell him on Sunday at the Lunch, but he’d been called away again to London, Joe said: business.
He’s not away now, though. He came back yesterday, I saw him on the path.
It had taken her a week, which she hadn’t expected—se
ven days of bouncing around off the Nissen hut walls, of taking fast walks in the middle of the night, of feeling her train of thought dismembered by even the simplest conversation and of giving the whole fucking manuscript up in disgust and then sitting back down, face to face with it again, in even more disgust, and of bullying and begging and dreaming awake ferociously until it was done, all done. She was finished and he’d want to know. “Nathan?”
God, I’m tired. I should just go home and get some sleep, tell him later.
No. I don’t want to sleep.
I want to tell him now.
“Are you there?” She hadn’t even called Jonno, not yet: partly because it was probably too early, but also because it was Nathan who should be the first to know. “Come on, Nate, it’s me.”
“Nathan?” When he didn’t answer, Mary tried his door. Not that Nathan ever locked it, even when he went away.
He’s not out with the dog, his music’s playing—bloody Bach again.
“Nathan?” She moved inside. The kitchen was as orderly as ever, except for the Thermos flask on the table, surrounded by a colourful litter of vaguely medical packages. Eckless padded up, quietly dishevelled, from an unaccustomed resting place near the stove and nudged against her while she prodded through boxes of various painkillers, sticking plasters, antiseptic ointments.
“Nathan? Are you awake?” Bach’s familiar patterns clambered and fell behind the closed living-room door. “I’m sorry it’s so early, but you know . . .” The dog sniffed at his empty water bowl and then left her, took himself soundlessly outside.
She found Nathan on the floor of the living room, a cushion from one of the armchairs under his head. “Christ.” The air numbed and slipped away from her as she ran and knelt beside him. “Nathan?”
“Hmn? Fuck, what? What?” When he turned over she could see the imprint of the cushion fabric, pressed into his cheek. “Mary?”
“You bloody—” She’d slapped at his shoulder before she could stop herself and before his hands could paddle up to shield his face.
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