All his life he had applied standards to himself that no human being could have met. It struck him then that if he had always had cause to despair, this was a fitting punishment for spending his time so foolishly. Of course, all he had wanted was to hold something completely still—his own image in the pool at the very least—in defiance of the constant flow of doubt, the fear of being discovered. But how lonely he had been in his own exacting company!
And now here were his worst fears. Here were change and uncertainty, in the most intimate area of his life: Rosalind. He simply let them be. And it was with a sense of the beautiful and mystifying injustice in the world that he acknowledged that, after all he had done wrong, he felt blessed with—hope.
Perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world: those who make life their subject and those who are the subject themselves. One act of violence had knocked Alistair Langford from the first category into the second. He watched his dignified wife hand her passport to the official and he waved and smiled at her as she went through.
Luke was out of breath. He had spent a frantic hour and a half, having to return once to the house for proof of identity, and to visit several branches of his bank. Now he ran back home from the high street. In his pocket was a wad of fifty-pound notes, which amounted to two thousand pounds. It was all he had had left in his account.
He had not been outside in the morning for a few weeks now. All was bright and busy on the high street and although the noise was an assault on his funereal mood, he was glad that other people were happy. In the queue at the bank, he had even attempted to count blessings: just to be white and male, to have no inherited deformities, to have an ordinary blood type—these things gave you an enormous head start.
Of course, he had been born into far more than this. But even with all that he had, Arianne had not loved him—had not even acknowledged him as a recipient of love. He had merely been, as she said, 'a temporary thing'. Her heart had not stopped at Luke Langford because the exchange had not seemed fair to her. His heart and mind and body for hers? No, not a good deal. He had aspired to her, but she had not aspired to him.
Why the hell had Rosalind promised him he was perfect? How could she have done that?
In self-disgust, he literally spat these last two thoughts out of his head. He knew perfectly well that his mother had always shown him unconditional support and had always done her best to prevent him falling through the gaps in Alistair's love. And on the one occasion his mother had needed his protection, after all that had happened to her marriage, to her heart essentially, which, in spite of her age, was no less real than his own, he had not really been listening. He had let her do his scrambled eggs the way he liked them and thought about himself.
When he went down to the annexe, he found Mila awake. She looked at him in puzzlement and said, 'I do not sleep. But I am so tired.'
He adopted the calm voice he had designed for the occasion. 'Well, you've been through a lot,' he told her. 'You're upset.'
'We are so like! she said, smiling at him. 'You also do not sleep if upset.'
Luke gritted his teeth and put the wad of money on the arm of the sofa. But just as he did so, Mila turned and ran to the mirror in the shower room. For a moment he was unsure if she had seen it, but when she spoke he knew she had not.
'Oh, is so ugly my face!' she cried. 'I think is bad for children see me!'
She was visible through the doorway. She tried to arrange her hair so that it covered some of the swelling, but it would not stay in place. She called out to him, 'Luke? How you say place in sea where is no one? Is little little country—very little.'
'Island?' Luke suggested. He wished she would just turn round, but who was he to interrupt the flow of her happiness?
'Yes, is right. Always you know! It is so clever.'
'But it's my own language,' he said.
Mila ignored this. 'Yes, I go in island for my face is nice again. Is nobody in there look me.' She giggled. 'But I think I like you also come. We are two people only in whole island. There is passport control: "Only Luke and Mila" Yes?'
He said nothing in reply and to an onlooker he might even have appeared not to be listening, but with each high note of her joy, he could feel himself collapsing inside. Very slowly, he began the business of folding and tidying away illusions about his own essential goodness, which he had long carried in his mind. Here they would remain, assuming their place among the other souvenirs of his childhood—his old sports medals and school photographs, his first-aid certificates.
Oblivious to all this, Mila went on, 'And also we eat fruit of trees and we go to the sea for wash and is beautiful sun!'
She came out of the shower room, and as she did so, she allowed the hair she had been piling on top of her head to tumble down around her shoulders. She was smiling and as her eyes caught sight of the wad of banknotes, she thought for one extraordinary moment that Luke had anticipated her dream. He had brought money for a holiday! They would go away together—not out of England, of course, because she had no passport—but somewhere as quiet as an island.
But the look in his eyes could not have allowed this to last. She understood immediately. Her body visibly shrank - her shoulders hunched, her head lowered, she drew her arms in against herself. She cowered. Luke said, 'Look, Mila, everything is going to be OK. I've called my friend Jess. OK? You can stay with her for a few days until you find somewhere. You just can't stay here now, that's all. I'm sorry. But Jess is lovely and ... I'll put you in a cab,' he said. 'I've called you a cab.'
She seemed unable to raise her face to look at him. He saw this, but he had decided what to say and he would doggedly say it. He continued, 'This money - this is two thousand pounds, Mila. You can get your passport and your National Insurance and the phone bills—everything you need for opening a bank account. Remember Goran said they're Serbs at Kwik-Kabs? I think it's the boss's brother who gets the passports. You know all this anyway. What I mean is, it's lucky because they'll explain it all in your language, won't they? So, all you really need,' he said, 'is the money. And here it is.'
His voice had built to a tinkling crescendo of optimism. When it had rung out and faded on the air like the sound of a bell, she found she could look at him. She found she could stare. She stared and stared at him until he turned away to an imaginary point of interest in the corner.
After a minute or so, she began to collect her possessions. He could hear her stuffing them into a plastic bag. He remembered Arianne finding the bag of Lucy's things under the sink when she was packing. She had said, 'It's all a trail of plastic bags, really, isn't it?' She had asked him to remember that this was not her fault.
It was not Arianne's fault. But why had he assumed he had any more control than she did over such wild phenomena? Just as he had when he kicked walls in self-loathing if his team didn't win the tournament, he had blamed himself for the temporary nature of love. Perhaps all along this had been a kind of egotism.
Luke's mobile rang and he answered it, knowing it would be the cab firm. 'Oh, OK. Thank you very much,' he said. 'Your cab's outside,' he told Mila, 'but there's no hurry. No rush.'
She snatched up her bag and when he looked at her tormented face he wondered how any of this had happened. What landslides of consequences were set off at the significant moments in life. A few months ago he had caught sight of a sexy girl on a table. And now? Now he wanted to press money into Mila's hand. But there it lay, filthily inadequate, on the arm of the pink sofa. After a while, her hand reached out for it and, with an expression of disappointment that her face would never quite lose after that moment, she said, 'I take money. What else I have?'
There was no answer to this. In silence, Luke watched her walk out of the annexe. In an image he would never forget, her face was caught, framed for an instant: a lost girl crying, passing a window on to a beautiful garden.
As the aeroplane climbed, Rosalind noticed the way the fields became patches of rich colour in an abstract painting.
England was going brown and yellow for autumn. It was incredible to think that in everyday existence, while she was down there, believing reality was the mess of people and the tangled details of life, this view was here for all who cared to see it. To the passenger on a plane that passed over her garden, she was merely a part of the blurry earth. But, to her, they were merely part of the blurry sky. Who was right? The answer was no one—or everyone, of course.
She remembered a programme she had once watched with Sophie about the beginning of the universe. It had been listed in the paper as The Story of the Earth and they had wondered how this could possibly be told in forty-five minutes, with commercial breaks. Sophie had been amused by the voiceover, which made the over-simplified physics sound like a trailer for a horror film. She had imitated it later for Alistair, wriggling her fingers at him as he poured a whisky:'" Toxic gases swirled and temperatures swerved between violent extremes."' But silly as the programme undoubtedly was to educated people, Rosalind had been deeply struck by one piece of information. Apparently energy was indestructible. It couldn't be created or destroyed, it merely took on different forms throughout the never-ending ages of its existence. It might become a gas or a rock or a person or an orange on a tree, or even a very loud bang. This meant everything on earth was made of energy that had always been around, just changing over time.
This idea still struck Rosalind as rather lovely somehow. She remembered the peaceful voice of Sister Margaret, reading to them at school from Ecclesiastes: '"What has been will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, 'See, this is new?' It has been already, in the ages before us.'"
The biblical words were unquestionably more beautiful, but it did sound like the same story.
It occurred to her then that perhaps, just like energy, emotion is indestructible. Even if it seems to have disappeared or to have arrived unexpectedly, it has only taken on a new shape. Perhaps, she thought, each family has its combined store of love and pain. And if people don't live out their share, then the most sensitive take it upon themselves to suffer.
She thought of all those battles she and Alistair had avoided - or Luke and Alistair, who had always been a disaster together, really. Perhaps Sophie had become a kind of family scapegoat, fighting it all out against her own starved body, her own scarred arms.
Oh, she had done such damage to herself over the years - and they had each privately blamed her for spoiling the peace in the house! Had Sophie in fact been acting, in some mysterious way, on their behalf?
Emotion must go somewhere, after all, she thought, if it can never be destroyed.
Both Rosalind and Alistair had often been seized with terror that their daughter's body would not fully recover and that she would never be able to have children. They had not voiced this concern, but Rosalind knew her husband shared it. She knew he shared it very painfully in the night. And she was also aware that if this had turned out to be the case, they would both have held him personally responsible. One way or another, he was the one who had brought hatred into the house; Rosalind had never hated anyone in her life.
But was this a cause for self-congratulation? She might not have hated, she might not have contributed so unmanageable a blast of emotion to the family store, but she had never loved enough, she told herself. Her love had stopped in the face of fear - her daughter's fear, her husband's fear, certainly. But even her sister's alcoholism and divorces had been impossible to confront. Suzannah could not forgive Rosalind for her emotionally hygienic mind—and quite rightly, Rosalind thought. After the split with her first husband, Suzannah had been devastated and her own sister, long in the habit of survival by restraint and pretence, had suggested they go to Kew Gardens for tea! Suzannah, being herself, had politely declined the invitation and drunk enough gin to kill a horse.
Only Luke had been easy to love because, until recently, he had spoken the same moderate emotional language as she did. He had been easy to love because he was so like her.
But this was simply not good enough! One had to love outside oneself. It was easy to be captivated by similarity, but to learn to love difference— frightening and mysterious as it might be—this was the second and the greater act of love.
Who, she thought, could such unwise parents thank but God Himself for the fact that their daughter was pregnant, for the fact that hatred had burnt off under the African sun? She had never felt closer to Sophie than she did now, at this precious time, when her own child was becoming a mother.
Just then she was aware of an absence, of something missing, and she looked at the empty seat beside her. Immediately her body told her to go and check that Alistair was all right because he seemed to have been gone a terribly long time.
Rosalind leant forward, but her hand stopped before it had reached the seatbelt.
As she sat back, a picture came into her mind - of the tickets for her trip round Italy, which, long ago, she had been afraid to use, which she had left suffocating behind the clock on her bedroom mantelpiece. Just then, her fears seemed curiously irrelevant: they were primitive and faintly sinister, like Aztec figurines.
Beneath her, she watched as the land gave way to sea and, gradually, sea was lost to clouds.
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