“What? No. Just tell me where you are. I’ll come. The man said he’d show me the way.”
Bye bye. Which language shall we use? Do svidanya.
“No, I’m not going. Don’t go away. Did you get stuck in the chapel? It’s dark there, and there’s water. Is that it?”
The chapel.
“But the door’s been open all the time.”
I went in.
“Gwen? Don’t sound like that. Please, it’s frightening me.”
And then . . . and then . . .
“Gwen?
“Gwenny?
“Gwen. Don’t go. Not again.”
• • •
The box on the wall had instructions written on it, though she had to wipe away grime and dust to read them properly. There was a button it told you to press if you wanted to make another call. She pushed it over and over and over again.
• • •
She tried going round to the other side of the wall. It involved working her way through more rooms inside the building, past spilled and shattered things. All she found was confusing wreckage. She was becoming painfully hungry.
She sat down eventually on the floor of hard squares beneath the telephone, clutching its silent handle to her chest, and cried until she could hardly breathe.
• • •
She had the idea of going around collecting things that weren’t too broken or filthy so that she’d have things to give the not-man in case he came back again. He’d already told her there’d be a guide to Horace’s house, but she was going to see whether she could change her mind and ask for help finding Gwen instead. She found a pile of the red-and-white-checkered cloths like the one she’d wrapped herself in to sleep. Some in the middle of the pile were fairly dry. She found a shiny round tray, big enough to see her whole face in when she held it up in front of herself. On a windowsill in a small upstairs room she found a mug with a curly handle, painted with a picture of the big house up the slope as it must have looked when people still lived in it. Inside the rim were words going around in a spiral: trelow christian fellowship. The picture was in summery colors, which seemed right for the not-man. She brought it down and put it on the telephone.
Her coat was dry enough to wear now, though it smelled of stale water and weeds, so she went back up to the big house and beyond into a patch of overgrown woodland bursting with the white froth of flowering thorn. Her father had shown her how you could pick the buds off the branches and eat them whole. Though it was still early for most of the trees, some were caught in a hollow out of the wind and had begun to sprout a few tight green pellets. She scratched her hands gathering them but she was so hungry she didn’t care. In among the ivy and rotting leaves she found a tiny clump of bitter sorrel, too small yet to be anything other than sour. She ate it anyway, down to the stem, and combed through the undergrowth with a wet stick looking for more.
The tumble of the stream was more muted here on the higher slopes where the manor house stood, and the wind had paused for once. She was working her way under knots of spiky branches when she heard a clatter and scrape from back by the outbuildings.
Someone was stepping through the mess.
She was halfway there before it occurred to her that it might be a different person again, someone else she didn’t know. (She heard the steps again, something being kicked aside.) She’d been hoping and waiting for the not-man in his yellow coat but that didn’t mean it was him. She slowed down and crept close against the unkempt cypress hedge that divided the big house from the barns, edging along it without a sound until she reached the edge. She peered carefully around.
Her heart leaped so high and hard it seemed to have torn itself loose.
A scrawny woman with long dark hair was pushing her way clumsily into the building across the courtyard. That particular kind of clumsiness was itself almost as familiar to Marina as the features of a face, but as the woman crossed the broken threshold she looked from side to side and Marina glimpsed her profile too, only for an instant and yet an instant was enough. She wasn’t lost anymore; the abandonment was over. She’d found Gwen.
PART III
17
Some weeks earlier, a forty-three-year-old woman was cycling along the margin of a semi-suburban ring road on the western outskirts of London. It would have been hard to say which was more utterly joyless, the thoroughfare or the woman. Her bicycle was loaded with panniers front and back, making it sluggish in the contrary wind. She’d just switched on her lights when a mobile phone in the front pannier began to ring.
She let it go to voice mail. It rang again. And so on. After the fourth time she pulled up wearily and leaned the bike against a lamppost. It was not quite twilight. Her thighs ached when she stood straight; she’d been riding for a long time. She unclipped the pannier and dug around for the mobile among the socks and underwear and dried apricots and energy bars, wondering why she hadn’t turned it off when she packed it.
She corrected the thought quickly. There was a reason why she always left the phone on. Just in case. Even after all these weeks, after a day short of eleven weeks (every one of them was notched on her heart), just in case. She extracted it with half-gloved fingers.
“Hello?”
“Finally. Where are you?”
It wasn’t the voice she’d been waiting for, hoping for, longing for. Of course not. It never was. She sucked in the chilly traffic-tainted air and thought about hanging up. She’d known, really, who was calling. That bludgeoning refusal to take no for an answer was unmistakable even in the guise of a ringing phone.
But then (she thought) it didn’t matter how he took her answer this time. It no longer mattered what he said or did. (The thought was so astonishing, it almost made her smile.) Instead of hanging up she held the phone a bit farther from her ear and blinked her eyes into focus, looking at a road sign in the middle distance.
“Egham,” she said. “Nearly. Just outside Egham.”
“Oh, okay. And what exactly are you doing in Egham?”
“Just outside.”
“All right, then, what are you doing just outside Egham? What are you doing in the Egham environs? In fact, what are you doing anywhere other than here?”
At any moment, she realized, she could cut him off with the touch of a finger, as if dotting a crumb from the tablecloth. At any moment. And (here the astonishment swelled into outright incredulity) the only reason she wasn’t doing so right now, the only reason she was submitting herself to the two-decades-old discipline of his meaty sarcasm, was that for all practical purposes she’d already hung up on him. She’d finally done it, that very morning.
She said, “I’m just passing through.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Fine. Sore bum, but otherwise.”
“. . .”
“How about you? Good day?”
“Right. I see your bike’s gone. Tell me you’re not thinking of riding all the way back from there. It’ll be dark in an hour. How far is it? For God’s sake. Egham, that’s halfway to Windsor.”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not thinking of riding all the way back.”
“There’s a station, isn’t there. Staines, Egham, Virginia Water.”
“Yes.” He doesn’t even know, she thought. He hasn’t noticed. “There’s definitely a station.”
“Right, then. How long did it take you? You can’t have ridden all the way there, it’s bloody miles. You’re only two weeks out of a cast.”
“Oh.” She checked the time on the phone. “A few hours.”
“A few hours.”
“Yes. Three or four. Ish.”
“So the BT bloke showed up this morning, then.”
“The what?”
“The BT bloke. The one we’ve been trying to get an appointment with for weeks. Who you were going to wait in for. In
stead of cycling to Egham. Nearly.”
“Oh yes.”
She sensed his tacit sigh, a quarter-part exasperation and three-quarters satisfaction at the opportunity to be exasperated. “But you forgot.”
“Not exactly.”
“You know what? I’ll wait in next time. If we can get an appointment again. It took me two hours to get through to them, and that was last week. But I’ll take the day off work. It’s only my career. At least it’ll get fixed that way.”
“I wouldn’t bother,” she said, after a small hesitation.
“Yes, I know you wouldn’t. That’s why I’d better do it myself. In fact, I’ll start calling now, I might as well sit here on hold for however many hours. In the meantime, why don’t you go find a train. I got some champagne for us.”
“I mean, you shouldn’t bother, love. No need. He came last Thursday, actually.”
“Who did?”
“The BT man.”
There was something else in the silence now, mixed in with the usual weary-smug contempt: a pinch of genuine puzzlement. If this was a game, she thought—which at bottom it was, the twenty-year marital game, whose rules were made up as you went along but once made could never be changed or deviated from—he’d have been demanding a time-out.
“I didn’t tell you,” she added, feeling slightly delirious.
“I spotted that.”
“I felt a bit funny about it.”
“Right. So, let’s start with . . . So the line’s fixed? He figured out the problem? Has it been better since Thursday?”
“We had sex.”
“. . .”
“Or he had sex with me, anyway. It was more that way around. He was sort of . . . imperious.”
Even the silence didn’t have anything to say now, so she went on.
“Which is why I didn’t mention that he’d come.” She coughed. “As it were.”
She could hear her husband breathing heftily.
“Anyway. I can’t remember what he said about the line, to be honest. I’m not sure he even did. Say anything about it. But he was down there for a bit so presumably he sorted out whatever was wrong. I suppose.”
She flinched when he started speaking again, before remembering that he was miles away. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll come and pick you up. I’ll leave right now. You head to the station and I’ll meet you there. All right?”
“Really,” she said. “Don’t bother.”
“Don’t argue.”
“I’m not arguing, Nigel. I’m telling you, don’t bother.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“Fuck it.”
She didn’t answer. She found herself almost curious about what he’d say.
“This is pointless. Fuck it. I’ve had enough. I came home early specially but you weren’t here and you know what my first thought was? Thank fuck. That’s what I thought. I actually don’t care anymore. You can ride back or take the train or take a tour of fucking Egham or do whatever the fuck you like. I’m going to drink this bottle of champagne in front of the TV and then I’m going to bed. Just fuck off somewhere so I don’t have to put up with your miserable fucking face anymore. Go and join the other wastes of fucking space. Or not. This is pointless.” She heard his mouth receding from the phone and pictured his hand moving to jab her into silence. He’d always liked to have the last word.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said, just before his finger hit.
• • •
Valentine’s Day: the festival of unsigned letters, heartfelt and hopeless declarations, dutiful tokens, guilty gestures, presents silently inspected for double meanings. Something, people knew, had been sent to them, some mysterious unanticipated message; but was it welcome? And who was it from?
• • •
Woozy with the adrenaline of freedom, she cycled carefully. The phone was off. She didn’t trust it to keep her location secret. She felt dangerous to herself, to others. As light left the sky and came down to concentrate in the flares of headlights and shopfronts she found it harder to keep track of her route. She was looking for small blue signs, always bolted too high up or too far from the junctions they indicated. She was aware of swerving or slowing down in the wrong places to follow their directions.
She passed the train station. Staines, Egham, Virginia Water. Having admitted where she was, she thought she’d better pedal on a bit farther. It surprised her how much sitting down could hurt, but she ignored it. Physical pain had become an abstract thing to her, almost a welcome distraction, and anyway she was going to have to get used to days in the saddle. Her leg wasn’t too bad. All that walking must have strengthened it gradually. Accidental rehab. They’d told her to go easy on it, but even after Christmas when she was still on crutches she had to get out of the house, away from the phone and the computer, the message that never came, the answers she could never find.
Just give them time, her husband said. (Often.) They’ll call when they’re ready. The police are right, there’s nothing more you can do. She almost loved him for his maladroit efforts to say something supportive. But she sat in front of the computer screen most nights, too terrified of her unhappiness to risk lying down in the dark, and might have done the same during the days as well if she hadn’t forced herself out the door.
Clumping around on crutches had made her shoulders strong too. A few weeks after being hospitalized with a cracked shin she was fitter than she’d been since her twenties. She ate. She was constantly astonished at herself for being alive, for continuing. Every time she went out she stood by the parapet of the bridge or at the edge of the station platform and thought, Here I am, only a small act of will away from not having to remember or feel anything ever again; but, mysteriously, the step over the parapet or in front of the train never happened. Even now, cycling by the edge of the road, she wasn’t quite sure what held her back from lining up an approaching lorry and timing her swerve so the driver would have no chance of braking in time. Perhaps she’d left it too late. Grief never got better, or so all the agony aunts and uncles agreed, but perhaps you lost the courage to rid yourself of it after the first few weeks. The window of opportunity might have closed while she was lying sedated and supervised in a hospital bed.
Or maybe it was that she still believed, even now, a day short of eleven weeks on, that one of those times the phone rang it wouldn’t be silence on the other end, but . . .
The phone. The phone. Donor and withholder of miracles, oracle of her despair. Delivering its dreadful news on the last day of November, without warning, without possibility of reply. Keep in touch, people said, meaning Use the phone, but it wasn’t like that. When you touched someone you knew they were there. Voices on the phone had exactly the opposite meaning: I am elsewhere. Not here, not with you. Out of reach. Gone.
Just remember what I said, okay? I’m not coming back. Okay, bye then. Bye.
There was a particular hour—about this time, early evening—that she’d learned to anticipate. It was when the distractions of the day gave out, the long, lonely night stretched ahead, and everything descended toward its unbearable worst. A sure sign of its approach was when she started remembering his voice on the answering machine. She slowed down a bit and concentrated on the biting soreness in her bum, and, when that didn’t work, on the fact that she was no longer waiting at home going mad but instead doing something again, making an effort. When that didn’t work either she dismounted. She happened to be adjacent to the graveled and privet-bordered front drive of someone’s stockbroker-belt mansion. She dropped the bike in the gravel, crouched beside it, and screamed for a while. There were lights in the front windows but no one came out. Stranger things had happened.
• • •
She got as far as Windsor that evening. There was no particular strategy, beyond the vague idea that each day she’d cycle h
erself close enough to exhaustion to be able to sleep without pills. She’d even thought about not packing the pills. On reflection, that was the only aspect of the plan which was obviously absurd. Still, she was going to run out of them eventually, so it made sense to experiment with other ways of achieving unconsciousness, short of The Big One. She reserved the right to keep The Big One as Plan B, or C, or however far down the alphabet patience and ingenuity could drive it.
A fire was burning in a meadow by the river as she approached the town. Snatches of drumming came through pauses in the traffic. Students, probably, though she’d heard that all sorts of people were beginning to join in these gatherings.
(Her husband: I don’t understand why people can’t just carry on like they did before.
Her [angry, guilty]: “People?”
Him: All right. You.)
There hadn’t been a specific moment when she’d decided she wasn’t going back to work. It had been as completely obvious to her that she wouldn’t as it had apparently been to him that, in time, she would. We could always try closing our eyes and wishing really hard, he said, and seeing if the mortgage will pay itself. The mortgage. The bills. The ticktock of their enviable, affluent, suburban existence: salary comes in, expenses go out. Tick, we spend. Tock, we earn. Bong, we die. A hundred words left on an answering machine had smashed the whole mechanism to pieces, but he’d refused to notice, not even when the effects appeared to be spreading beyond the prison walls of their house, out onto the streets where impeccably ordinary people suddenly stopped clocking in for their daily labor or began throwing bricks at banks. Even in her well-heeled part of London a few youngsters and their allies had begun gathering on the common after dark, in the bitter nights around the new year, lighting a small fire or two. The police had put a stop to it. As she cycled toward the illuminated blob of the castle above the river she heard sirens. They didn’t seem to be aiming for the little group in the meadow. Out here, maybe, there were things that needed stopping more urgently.
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