Usually Connor was the chef on board, as well as the person who cleared away and tidied. He loved to cook and did so with the dedication of the self-taught. He bought cookery books, cut recipes out of magazines and followed them meticulously, collected tips from friends, was proud of the collection of oils and the sharpness of his knives. He rarely had time during the week, but at weekends he might spend an entire day going to the market for food and coming home to cook it. Gaby would tell him to give himself a break, scramble an egg or order a takeaway, but it was the act of preparing an elaborate meal that relaxed him. In his head, he had already planned the supper he would make the following night for himself and Gaby: Moroccan chicken, he thought, cooked with saffron, cinnamon, ginger and preserved lemons. He imagined himself, bathed and rested, in clean clothes, sitting across the table from her. He could suddenly see her face quite clearly: the tiny scar across her lip that whitened when she smiled, the tendrils of her hair snaking down her freckled, blemished, generous face.
There were only two tiny gas-rings on the boat, so some of the ingredients were cool and congealed by the time they made it on to the plate. The yolk of Connor’s egg had split and oozed stickily into the sludge of beans. The toast was burnt and the sausage pink on one side, charred and split on the other. The instant coffee was bitter and tepid. It didn’t matter, for the two men were hungry and weary after their nights of snatched sleep, and from days spent in the wind. They sat on deck, plates balanced on their knees, with creased, ruddy faces and sour morning breath, and ate wordlessly, wiping their mouths on their sleeves. They had tied up in the port a few hours ago, and other boats bobbed on either side of them; the clink of their halyards and the voices of the crews floated towards them over the calm water. The boat rocked gently under them.
Connor liked the way that Stefan could go for hours without talking. During the days that they spent together each year, it was almost an unspoken rule that they should not discuss work, politics or ideas. Their normal life receded, and in its place was the confined and complicated world of the boat, surrounded by the indifference of the sea. They discussed the weather, the forecast for tomorrow, the night watches, the state of the engine, the bilge pumps, the rigging of the main sail, spinnaker and jib. They tied knots, coiled ropes, mended damaged lockers and replaced cleats, scrubbed the deck and sometimes peered at the chart they spread on the table. Sailing up the coast, eye on the depth-sounder, they looked out at the tiny fishing villages and the deserted beaches; in open sea, they pointed out sea birds, or ships on the horizon, commented on the shape of the clouds or the way the sun splashed dabs of silver light over the water. They watched for squalls ruffling the waves into a corrugated darkness. They made each other endless cups of coffee and tumblers of whisky. In the evenings when they were moored in a small port, they would often play chess or backgammon before climbing into their narrow bunks and listening to the creaking of the boat’s timbers and the slap of water against her bows. Now, however, no longer at sea, both men could sense their lives pressing in on them again. As they ate, they were thinking of appointments and tasks, people to see and phone calls to make. Connor had already tried to ring Gaby, but there was only an answering-machine at home and her mobile was switched off.
He watched Stefan sitting across from him, plate balanced on his lap. The lick of dark blond hair fell over his face, but his expression was contented as he chewed his half-raw, half-burnt sausage. Connor wondered what he was thinking of. Even after twenty years, he found his brother-in-law mysterious. At first glance, he seemed straightforward: a candid, dreamy, clumsy man without an unkind bone in his body. He’d steered his way through the rancours of university life by not noticing them, the way a boat will sail serenely among a buried landscape of icebergs, its hull passing within a millimetre of being pierced. He was generous to colleagues and helped students with an unstinting avuncular benevolence. He was courted by eager women who wanted to mother him, but appeared rarely to notice them either. He could lose himself in his own mind, or in the book he was reading or the period he was studying, so the outside world almost ceased to exist. Gaby worried that he sometimes went for entire days without a meal, because he had forgotten about food; at other times Connor had seen him consume two lunches in quick succession, because he had not remembered he had eaten. Occasionally he wore inappropriate outfits – grey suit trousers and a brown suit jacket to a meeting, a thick jersey on a summer day, a thin T-shirt in the middle of winter. Clothes had frequently lost their buttons or come unravelled at the hem, but he never bought new ones. Almost everything he wore had been got for him by Gaby and their mother. Often, he wouldn’t shave, so a thick almost ginger stubble grew; once or twice he had cut his own hair with kitchen scissors, giving himself a radically skewed fringe. He could look as unkempt as a tramp. His study was almost impossible to enter: books teetered in towers or lay in collapsed heaps across the floor; pamphlets and letters, ripped folders and yellowing newspapers barricaded the entrance. At his university, he was famous for the mess of his room and for his habit of forgetting he was supposed to be giving a lecture (just as he was famous among family and friends for failing to meet appointments). Yet the work he produced from such disorder was vivid and lucid; his largely unscripted lectures were widely admired; the books he had written were praised for their scholarly clarity.
But Connor had thought for a long time that something else was going on underneath the ramshackle kindness of his brother-in-law, and on the weeks that they spent together in Stefan’s boat, he watched him. Although Stefan would discuss ideas at excited length, he never talked about his own feelings, or even about events in his life, like friendships or relationships – and, indeed, he rarely used the word ‘I’, as if he was trying to erase himself from himself. Connor had seen him cry at films and books, and once at a painting they were standing in front of in Pisa, but never at something that had happened in his own life. And he could only remember seeing him lose his temper on one occasion, long ago: he’d looked out of his window on a rainy summer evening and seen Stefan hitting a shrub outside his and Gaby’s front door, violently and repeatedly, with his umbrella. He could still see the expression on his face, of rage and humiliated despair. But Stefan hadn’t known anyone was looking, and a few minutes later, sitting in the kitchen with Gaby and Connor, he had been as sweet and sunny as usual.
That scene had haunted Connor through the years, and when he could not prevent himself remembering it, a chill would spread through him and leave him wretched. For there was a forlorn quality about Stefan, though he couldn’t put his finger on it because it wasn’t displayed in his cheerful behaviour or even his expression. It was as if the sun had gone down on him and he was now standing in twilight. Although he would never agree with Gaby when she said the same thing, Connor knew that Stefan had not been like that when they had first met all those years ago, outside Gaby’s shared house, and Connor had assumed he was Gaby’s lover, not her adored brother. But then, of course, Nancy had been with him and Stefan had shone with grateful happiness. Something had changed in him the day she left. Optimism had become instead a kind of eagerness; joy had turned into cheerfulness; patience had mutated into stoicism. It was like the lights being turned down in a room, so that while nothing else alters, the atmosphere becomes subdued.
‘What will you be doing this time on Tuesday?’ he asked.
‘Tuesday? That’s – um –’
‘Tomorrow, when we go home, is Monday,’ said Connor, helpfully.
‘Yes. Let’s see. I think I have a faculty board meeting to go to on Tuesday. It rings a bell, anyway. Beginning of the academic year, all of that. There are so many meetings. I could spend my entire teaching life not teaching and researching but going to meetings about teaching and researching. Sometimes I go and I don’t say a single word, except “thank you” when they give me tea and biscuits. Always those chocolate Bourbons and custard creams.’
‘We have chocolate Bourbons and custard creams, too, at
our meetings.’
‘Horrible things.’
‘Are they? I’ve never really had strong opinions about them.’
‘I always seem to lose mine when I dunk them, and then I have to fish around with a spoon and make a mess in the process. So, Connor, the last night on board until next year. Pub meal or are you going to cook?’
‘Your choice.’
‘I think I’d like you to cook, you know. Nothing complicated. How about a steak? Steak and bread and red wine.’
‘I can go to that butcher’s in town that’s always open on a Sunday.’
‘Sometimes, in the middle of winter, I find myself thinking about the boat all alone and empty in the boatyard, waiting for me. Anyway, what about you?’
‘Me?’
‘On Tuesday. What’s waiting for you? Apart from Gaby, I mean.’
‘Oh – a few patients. And then meetings, I expect. Letters, forms to fill in, emails to go through. Bureaucracy.’
‘Hmm. Don’t you want that bacon? Because if you don’t, do you mind if I have it? Thanks. Does it get you down?’
‘My work?’ Connor thought about a recent patient who had lost both legs in an accident. He was a middle-aged man, a successful middle-class professional who was articulate and apparently in control of his life. But when Connor had first met him, he had lost the power to communicate except in whimpers and cries, like a baby before it learns how to speak. It was as if he had become the pain, inhabited it entirely, and there was no bit of him that could stand outside it and observe it.
‘Doctors often don’t listen to their patients,’ he said now to Stefan, not really answering his question but following his own train of thought. ‘Especially when severe pain has smashed their ability to describe what they’re going through. They think that patients are unreliable narrators of their own experiences and that objective science holds the answers they seek. I used to think that too. But pain can’t be tracked like that. It moves around. It lives in people’s bodies very differently. It’s not just about bravery, stoicism, whatever. Your pain isn’t mine: it’s unique to you. You have to trust the human voice. That’s what I’ve learnt over the years.’
When the man he was thinking of, the amputee, was able to talk again and describe how he was feeling, it was a sign of his recovery. The pain was still there, but it no longer possessed him. Connor thought about all the cries and whimpers he had heard as a doctor, all the terrible sounds that people make when they’re in agony. Everything else disappears; they have no story left to tell. All they can do is moan like an animal in distress.
‘Pain obliterates,’ he said. ‘It’s very lonely. You can’t share it. I once had a conversation with a philosopher and she said something that I’d never even thought of, not in all the years I’d been working in the field. She said that pain has no outside object – I mean, you feel fear of something, you feel love for somebody, yet you simply feel pain. You can’t refer it to anything outside you. Just imagine how many people are in pain, and it’s invisible, contained within the body. Stand in the Underground and probably someone just a few feet away is hurting, and you’ve no idea. It’s a strange thought, isn’t it, that great gap between their reality and yours? You can’t bridge it but, as a doctor, you can make it a little less lonely by recognizing it, at least, though doctors aren’t very good at that sometimes – sometimes they almost seem to do the opposite. And you can help ease it, even erase it. Although, as Chekhov once said, where there are hundreds of remedies, you can be sure there is no cure. There are things we can do now that people wouldn’t have believed even a decade ago … And imagine if you’d been alive two hundred years ago – or in your period, five hundred years ago. Imagine even commonplace events, a breech birth, say, or toothache.’ There was a silence. Stefan was frowning into space, his face wrinkled in thought. Connor picked up the last slice of sausage and popped it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, then tipped the last of the cool coffee down his throat.
He himself had never experienced severe, or even moderate, physical pain. He’d torn a ligament when skiing, sliced open a finger cutting up vegetables, had wisdom teeth removed, suffered hangovers and sore throats, ached for a while with flu. But the kind of hurt that he witnessed as a doctor every day was utterly unfamiliar and unimaginable to him, a foreign land that he knew, one day, he would probably have to visit. When he’d watched Gaby in labour, he’d been horrified by her howls and screams and ferocious obscenities (Gaby hadn’t even tried to hold back: she’d been stupendously uninhibited in her public demonstration of pain), by the way she’d writhed and thrashed on the bed like a landed fish, and most of all by the way her face, which he’d thought he had seen in every shifting mood, had become unfamiliar to him, her mouth drawn back over her teeth in a snarl.
‘I’ll go and get the steak in a minute,’ he said.
‘What about pain that isn’t physical?’ asked Stefan, suddenly, turning towards him.
‘Ah, now.’
‘What you’re saying – well, can you say the same about that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Connor. He stood up and brushed crumbs from his clothes. ‘I’m a doctor not a priest.’
Eleven
Where on earth was she? She struggled up to a sitting position and blinked in the shafts of light that slanted through the window. For a moment, everything was a bleached-out dazzle, which gradually took shape. A bed, photographs, a wardrobe and a chest of drawers; through the window, a stone wall, grass, small thorny trees and a distant sea. She’d been sleeping with one hand under her head and now pins-and-needles were tingling through it. She rubbed her fingers together, then swung her feet to the floor and stood up, face creased, dazed, a stale taste in her mouth, staggering like a jet-lagged passenger emerging into a new temporal zone.
In the bathroom, she discovered that Nancy had already thrown her disposable toothbrush into the bin, cleaning her away as soon as she had left. Gaby retrieved it, brushed her teeth vigorously, dropped it back into the bin and splashed cold water over her face. Only then did she look at her watch, squinting to make sure she wasn’t mistaken. It was nearly half past two: she’d been fast asleep on Nancy’s bed for hours. Indeed, she saw now that, outside, the sun had moved across the sky and was already quite low and yellow as a yolk, sending its long fingers across the moors, filtering softly through the trees. Gaby fumbled for her mobile and scrolled down her address book to the number for National Rail Enquiries. She asked for trains from Liskeard to London, this after-noon, and was told that there were no further trains that day because of works on the line. What about a replacement bus service? she asked. There was one to Plymouth but it had left twenty minutes ago. The next train from Liskeard to London was the following morning.
Gaby stood becalmed at the top of the stairs, wondering what to do – although she already knew, even as she knew that she shouldn’t, she mustn’t. She would stay here, in Nancy’s house. She would sleep in the spare room and make sure the duvet was pulled back exactly as it had been. She would buy supplies from the shop in the village, assuming it was still open at this time on a Sunday, then clear away the meal, replacing everything neatly, rubbing away any tiny stains. She would leave no trace and tomorrow she’d sneak out of the front door, lock it and leave the key under the boulder. No one would ever know. It would be her secret night, shut away inside herself.
The first thing to do was to buy food, for she was already ravenous and she didn’t want to raid Nancy’s cupboards. She found her jacket hanging in the hall downstairs and then, feeling chilly, she pulled one of Nancy’s coats over the top, and pocketed the key and her wallet. She slipped out of the house like a thief, casting nervous glances around her, and walked briskly back to the centre of Rashmoor, past the pub and the antiques shop, to the grocery and off-licence she’d noticed last night. It was surprisingly well stocked for a village shop, with fresh vegetables and locally baked bread, and was still open, although the woman behind the counter was packing things up a
nd while Gaby was still inside turned the ‘open’ sign to ‘closed’. Gaby bought a wholemeal baguette, four tomatoes, a packet of ham, some Cornish cheese, a small jar of instant coffee, a half-litre of milk and a bottle of red wine. As she was about to leave, she turned back for ten Silk Cut and a box of matches.
As she walked up the lane, a few leaves spun slowly through the air towards her. She held out a hand and caught one for luck. She wanted it to be evening, so that she could sit in the small house with her picnic and her wine, and look out at the darkening landscape and the stars becoming visible, one by one. But it was barely three o’clock and she felt fidgety and full of unsatisfied energy. She went out into the garden, where the bonfire from last night was still smoking and giving off heat, and smoked the first of her cigarettes. The rush of dizziness pleased her, and she leant against the apple tree pulling smoke into her lungs and gazing out at the sea in the distance. She wanted to be in those waves, salt water in her eyes, gasping with the cold and facing out to nothingness.
Before she had time to change her mind, she went back into the house and found Nancy’s swimsuit and her towel, still damp, hanging above the boiler. The bike was in the lean-to at the back of the house, and she rolled the costume into the towel, pushed it into the basket. Through the gate, and having put the key to the front door under the stone, she hoicked her skirt up and was off, wobbling over tree roots and boulders. She didn’t really know where she was going, simply headed for the sea, which disappeared from view as she went down a steep hill, then re-emerged, glinting in the sun. Eventually, she dismounted and pushed the bike over a recently ploughed field, the mud sticking heavily to her sandals, and left it leaning by the fence, which she climbed over, tearing her skirt and stinging her calf on a nettle as she did so. But there at last was the sea, down a steep, rocky bank, through vicious thornbushes, which grabbed at her hair and snagged her shirt, then on to a crop of land between two rocky stretches, too gritty and small to be called a beach. Waves slapped the shoreline, leaving a crooked necklace of seaweed in their wake.
The Moment You Were Gone Page 13