Nobody approached her, though Cora behind the bar had waved a vague greeting to her as she came in. The intervening years had reduced Norah to a once-familiar face that could not be instantly placed. But then, her memory of those who had peopled her young marriage had also dimmed. She recognised the postmistress (what was her name?) who used to beam at Norah as if she were visiting royalty. And there was Louis’s Uncle Pat, haphazardly shaved and bow-legged, leaning against a stool, his chest softly growling as he tried to draw breath.
Ray, Louis’s boyhood friend whose approval had once been so important, was handing out fistfuls of shorts, a cigarette clamped in the fork of his thick, scored fingers. He had smiled shyly as he passed Norah earlier in the church. She was sitting several pews down on the groom’s side while he had stood beside Louis at the front, a brotherly arm around his shoulders. She had watched the back of Louis’s head, his hair curling over his collar, his ears large and defenceless, the soft hulk of his back, and felt a choking sort of sadness. Not for him, but for the ancient loss of him.
‘It’s Louis,’ he had said when he rang with the news.
From his new life in America. She still regarded it as his new life though it was hardly apt. He had been away five years now. She had considered it running away. That was not her way. Hers had been to dig in deeper, to disappear into the debris of their marriage, to live among the ruins.
‘Louis Plunkett,’ he added hastily as if there were a danger she would confuse him with some other Louis.
When he had first gone away he had rung regularly at odd hours of the morning because he couldn’t get the hang of the time difference. She remembered those conversations and the poignant intimacy they achieved over the transatlantic hiss, the stalwart solidarity of two people who had survived a calamity as if their broken marriage were an external event, a natural disaster like a hurricane or an earthquake. Then the phone calls had petered out and she knew he had found someone else. He had settled in Ann Arbor, a place that sounded to Norah like the name of another woman. Safe in the arms of Ann Arbor.
‘It’s my mother,’ he had said. In the background she could hear the disappointed cadence of airport announcements. ‘I was wondering …’
‘The funeral?’ she prompted.
There was an audible sigh from the other end.
‘Would you?’
She had agreed heartily; it was only now, sitting in the albuminous wash of a lounge bar afternoon, that she wondered what she was doing here.
Louis finally broke away and brought her the by now tepid whiskey. He took off his coat and slung it on a stool beside him. She resisted the temptation to lift the sleeve that was trailing in the sawdust and to fold it carefully. Even when they were married she wouldn’t have done so; it would have been too wifey. They had prided themselves on not being conventional even as she marched down the aisle in white. To check one another they had used pet names. ‘Now who’s being Agatha?’ he would taunt when she complained about having to pick up his dirty socks from the bedroom floor. ‘Bangers and mash, George,’ she would bark when he would ask what was for dinner. She smiled now at the bragging childishness and saw the fierce denial at the centre of it – George and Agatha. As if they had never played themselves. Louis had boasted to friends that he wouldn’t have a rolling pin in the house because theirs wasn’t that kind of marriage. Which meant that Norah had to use a milk bottle; for baking, that is. All her piecrusts had the letters MBL imprinted on them. Sometimes, faint vestiges of the warning on the bottles would also appear before the tart went into the oven: Must Not Be Used Without Permission.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this place hasn’t changed.’
She wasn’t sure if he meant the pub or the country.
‘You look well,’ she offered.
And he did. The years of hot summers had given him a glossy, cosmetic air. His clothes – the neat jacket, the tastefully sombre tie, the stiff white shirt – bore the hand of another woman. She tried to imagine the woman at the other end of his life, roused in the graveyard hours by the death of someone she had never known, standing in her slip at the ironing board pressing his good clothes while he called Reservations.
‘I’m knackered, to tell you the truth. Haven’t slept in days.’
The pub was clearing slowly. The postmistress (Mrs Baines! – the bane of our lives, Louis used to say) came over to shake his hand. She was a stout, raddle-faced woman with small, pert lips.
‘Your poor mother, Louis,’ she said, peering at him with an inquisitive sympathy. ‘All alone at the end.’
Louis shifted uncomfortably.
‘And with no family here, but Pat and …’ she paused and turned to Norah, ‘your good self, of course.’
Norah did not know whether to feel complimented by this, her first official inclusion, or to be offended by the obvious reproach.
‘If she were at home itself. They go downhill once they go into those homes.’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘You’ll be selling the place, I suppose. Nothing to keep you here now.’
Norah felt oddly, bleakly disowned.
* * *
She had visited Mrs Plunkett once at the nursing home after Louis had gone away. She felt she owed it to her; it was a last-ditch attempt to be liked, she realised now, though with Louis gone it was less likely than it had ever been. It was an old manor house set in half an acre of rutted parkland. A modern annexe had been built on, with floor to ceiling windows which gave on to seeping foggy fields. Matron directed her to the Rec Room; in her mind’s eye Norah saw a dry dock full of rusting hulks.
Mrs Plunkett was sitting in a large circle of plastic chairs as if a group therapy session were about to start, or an afternoon tea dance. Only one other chair was occupied by an old man in a cap with a leathery face and chipped teeth. He had no legs; he sat there like a lewd version of a nodding children’s toy, his stumps swaddled in a tartan rug, grinning broadly and winking at Norah.
‘Mrs Plunkett?’ Norah whispered.
Her mother-in-law was sitting upright with her hands firmly planted on a walking frame, but in fact she was fast asleep.
‘Mrs Plunkett?’
Startled she awoke and seemed ashamed, as if Norah had come upon her having a secret tipple.
‘It’s me,’ Norah said. ‘Norah.’
Her mother-in-law’s eyesight was failing.
Norah drew up a chair beside her.
Mrs Plunkett registered no surprise at her former daughter-in-law being there. Just as she had barely reacted when Louis told her they were separating. It was as if their lives were inauthentic in some way, Norah had thought, as foreign and as passively regarded as a television soap opera.
‘Did you come down today?’
‘Yes, on the train,’ Norah replied, wanting to elaborate but finding nothing more to say. There had never been much small talk between them.
‘I find the days very long here,’ Mrs Plunkett said after a while. ‘I can’t get round, do you see. I can’t get round like I used to.’
‘Have you heard from Louis?’ Norah asked. She was still hungry for news of him then, or even to talk about him in a kindly and abstracted way.
‘In the summer you can walk in the garden but with my pins I’ve seen the last of the garden, I’d say.’
‘Does he write?’ Norah asked gingerly.
‘Timmy there,’ Mrs Plunkett gestured conspiratorially to the man with the amputated legs. ‘Timmy there’s always asking how much land I have. I think he’s after me.’
Norah abhorred this flirty gaiety. She preferred the patients who sat sunk in primeval gloom. A restive silence fell between them.
‘It’s night-time there now,’ Mrs Plunkett said suddenly.
‘Night-time where?’
‘Where Louis is,’ she said quietly. ‘I count the hours …’
As did Norah, frequently. It was a kind of mental housekeeping. Before going to sleep she would do a quick calculation and t
hink, without rancour or envy, he’s probably leaving work now, or going to the cinema, maybe. It was a way of placing him, of rendering him fixed.
‘And neither of us have him,’ his mother said.
The key turned stiffly in the lock and Louis stepped into the small hallway, which smelled of damp disuse. It was icy as if the cold fingers of death had edged their way into the place. The kitchen of the small cottage had been ‘improved’ since Norah had been there last. There was a fridge now in place of the bucket of water Mrs Plunkett had once used to store milk. The fireplace had been bricked up and in its place a two-bar electric fire with mock coals had been installed. Louis stooped and plugged it in. It cast a phosphorescent glow on the parquet-look lino which had been laid over the old flagstones. The only sign of life in the place was Louis’s two bags opened and spilling out their contents on to the floor. He fished out a woollen sweater and put it on. (It was true, Norah thought, exile makes people soft.) Then rummaging further he retrieved a bottle of duty-free whiskey. He hunted around for glasses, sliding back one door and then another of the kitchen cabinets, which released musty little bouquets of neglect. He found two dusty tumblers with bees painted on them, free offers with a honey promotion.
‘So,’ Louis said, setting the bottle and beakers down on the kitchen table. It could have been an interrogation scene: two near strangers sitting on hard chairs in a darkening room lit only by the sickly hue from the fireplace.
‘So,’ he repeated, ‘how have you been?’
She felt she had so little to offer. Years of recuperation, a steady but mean renewal of her life. She spoke about her job; she was head of her department now with her own office and a car. She did not talk about men. It was an unwritten rule between them, a kind of deference. He enquired about Patricia, the baby sis, he always called her. And her mother, of course, who was slipping slowly into senility.
‘The poor old bird,’ Louis said, refilling their glasses. ‘Who’s looking after her?’
‘I am,’ she said.
‘Oh, I see, the dutiful daughter.’
‘I couldn’t just abandon her.’
‘Like I did, you mean.’
The accusation sat between them in the gathering dusk. Louis narrowed his eyes over the plume of spirits in his glass. Norah watched him covertly. She could barely see him in the deepening shadows so she had to imagine his bog-coloured eyes, those big soft hands of his, the fluttering nerve in his cheek. As she had done for five years.
She remembered once, shortly after they separated, finding a note from Louis in the kitchen. He still had a key to the house. She had never got round to asking for it back. The kettle had been broken and he had scribbled a message to her on the back of an envelope.
‘What you need,’ it read, ‘is a new element.’
For a moment she thought he was being philosophical and she remembered standing there contemplating this proposition, basking in his new wisdom about her, as if he were offering one last remedy in a gnomic code. Then, stung by her own foolishness, she crushed the note into a tight ball and set fire to it in the sink.
Darkness fell. The reproachful silence between them blossomed into a mournful but easy complicity. Too easy, Norah thought.
‘I really should be going,’ she said.
‘You can’t drive with all that drink in you,’ he said.
She’d learned to drive since they’d split up; it seemed apt, as if she were finally taking control of her life. A blue Micra sat outside, a nifty compact, a perfect ladies’ drive, as the salesman described it. Louis put a restraining hand on her wrist. It was the first time he had touched her since they’d met.
‘I can’t, Louis.’
‘Why not?’
‘Not here.’
‘You mean people will talk? Hell, let them. I mean, technically, we’re still man and wife.’ He cupped his hands over hers. They sat like that for several minutes like children making a solemn pact. She could feel goose pimples rise on her forearm. She attributed the stirrings within her to the artificial heat and the whiskey.
‘Don’t, Louis, please.’
She disentangled her fingers.
‘The Big No,’ he said in mock basso.
She rose and shrugged on her coat.
‘Is this it, then?’ he asked.
* * *
It was she who had asked that question when they had parted. After the break-up (she favoured the term break-up; it suggested a dramatic shipwreck as opposed to breakdown, which was like an engine running out of steam) she felt obliged to remove the framed photograph of their wedding from the mantel. But she still kept a holiday snap of him stuck into the corner of the dressing-table mirror. There had been no final ritual – no death, no divorce – so he remained there like some lost figure, a hostage or a pilot missing in action. They were still, after all these years, just separated, as if only time and circumstance were keeping them apart. The Ex, she would say jokingly, if anyone asked who it was. The ultimate abbreviation. The Ex. Shedding the ring had taken longer. It took until Louis stopped wearing his. She had met him by chance on the street. It was the first thing she had noticed, the naked finger. He had rubbed at it self-consciously.
‘I didn’t see the point,’ he had said.
She had felt betrayed. Somehow she had always thought that this was something they would do together. She had imagined a grand gesture, the pair of them standing on a bridge and flinging the gold tokens high into the air and watching them dazzle briefly before falling into the waters below.
They made love desperately on his mother’s bed. She had thought it would be like a gentle stroll through a childhood haunt; a marvelling at the orchard’s windfalls, an easy climb to the dark aperture of the old barn, a cushioned fall in the springy hay. Instead they clawed at one another, all fingernails and spittle. They wrestled greedily, their sweaty flanks slapping against one another, both of them bellowing and braying, joyously aghast at this suddenly unleashed appetite. They lay afterwards on the candlewick bedspread, smelling of semen, their good clothes crumpled and gaping. If they had been naked it would have seemed less illicit, Norah thought. And yet as they lay there, fingers barely touching, eyes locked in the questioning embrace of aftermath, she realised that this was the first time she had desired Louis. It had not been a matter of comfort. Her own, or his. An hour passed in a grave, sprouting silence.
‘I’m an orphan now,’ Louis said finally.
He had broken the spell. She had forgotten his weakness for lofty self-pity. She pulled herself up and wedged several pillows behind her. His hand rested lazily against her thigh. She listened as his breathing grew quieter, steadier, and he drifted into sleep. She wanted to reach out and stroke his hair or touch the blue-veined skin around his temples but she was afraid of her own tenderness now. And, anyway, she would only wake him and what was the point in that?
It was the early hours of the morning before she slid from the bed. She wrapped her coat around her and stepped into her abandoned shoes. She stood for a moment in the doorway before picking her way through the dark kitchen.
‘Bye-bye,’ she called out softly as she pulled the front door to. There was no reply. As she drove through the moonlit countryside she thought of him lying on the littered remains of the conjugal bed, like an undiscovered corpse.
BOOM
‘Dee-da.’
‘Did you hear that?’ Frank Shaw has just come into the kitchen. It is a late summer’s evening after rain, drenched and lambent. He is in shirtsleeves, tie loosened, elasticated braces like forked leather tongues. ‘He said Daddy!’
Rosemary, rubber-gloved in suds, turns around to look down at her toddler son. Little Timmy is sitting in the playpen on an upholstered bottom, clenched fist aloft in salute.
‘Dee-da.’
The child seems rapt at something going on at calf level – the tanned denier of his mother’s stockings, her pert kitten-heeled slippers, the pink feathery rosette on her instep that he always wants to eat.
‘He said Daddy!’
‘No, he didn’t!’ Rosemary lifts a glass in her muffled paw and holds it up to the golden light.
‘I tell you, he said Daddy.’
Timmy’s father stoops down, a big urgent face leering through the bars. ‘Say it, Tim, say it again.’
Dee-da.
‘Oh, Frank, you’re hearing things.’ Rosemary tamps down something on her eyelid with the back of her pink gauntlet.
‘Say it, Tim, Da-dee. Da-dee.’
‘Dee-da!’ the child brays. ‘Dee-da!’
Today you have been to see the Man with the Quiet Voice who smells of tobacco and wet tweed and isn’t called the Doctor. The Doctor has an office full of sneezes, a torch with a blazing light and a finger made of sandpaper that he puts on your tongue. Not like the Man with the Quiet Voice who sits on a wet park bench with his hands hiding in his pockets while the rain drips from the hood of the go-car down on to your knees. Mum sits beside him in her clear plastic raincoat so that you can see her dress and her cardy and everything underneath. How’s my little man, the Man with the Quiet Voice says, gripping your nose in a fleshy vice between his big fingers. Say hello, your mother says, sweet and secretful. Say hello to the nice man, Tim.
‘Tim! Ti … m?’
His name has always sounded emaciated to him. Timid, timorous, a thin-lipped emaciated hum. When the strangeness of waking up calling out his own name passes, he thinks it might have been Reggie calling him. Maybe she’s left a message and it’s her subliminal voice that has woken him. But no, when he checks, the red light is steadfast.
‘You still have a machine!’ Reggie marvelled.
Voicemail and texts and disembodiment, that is Reggie. Now, there’s a name! He loves the two-syllable strength of it, the juicy rich double consonant of the diminutive.
‘Yeah, well, you can imagine what convent girls made of Regina,’ she’d said. ‘They pronounced it with an I!’
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