The boy cast out his line again, waited for his lure to sink.
‘How old do you think that kid is?’ asked Millicent.
‘Seven? Eight?’ I said.
‘Max couldn’t do that when he was eight. He can’t do it now. These kids are so … attuned.’
‘Max doesn’t have to know how to kill fish. He needs to know how to stay out of fights and entertain girls at parties. He’s good-weird, not bad-weird. He doesn’t smoke crack and he hasn’t got anyone pregnant. He’s perfectly attuned to London life.’
‘He’s eleven.’
‘You know what I mean. He’s not stupid, and he’s not easily led. He’s his own person.’
‘Do you think he’d like it here?’
‘There’s a leading question,’ I said.
‘It’s just a question, Alex.’
I turned to look at her. Her eyes were shining. She tilted her head, half-raised an eyebrow.
‘The answer’s no,’ I said. ‘Absolutely, definitely not.’
‘No, what?’
‘We are not moving to Norway.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting that,’ she said, but there was hurt in her voice.
‘You sort of were, Millicent.’
‘Oh, OK, look … I’m not seriously suggesting …’ The muscle in her cheek twitched, and her nostrils flared slightly. ‘Alex, can’t you just go with the idea for a moment? Be a bit playful? Humour me, and not go all dark?’
‘I like it here too,’ I said.
‘Maybe we could give him a bit more of what these kids have?’
‘Maybe you could teach him how to trap and skin a rabbit?’ I said. ‘Pass on the fieldcraft you learned growing up in LA.’
She laughed and touched my arm. ‘So we’re city people. These people are city people too. But they have this.’
Grey-blue woodsmoke carried whispers of grilled lamb and grilled fish. The fjord shimmered, electric and unreal. I thought of looking up through the water, breath held, thought of Millicent in a thousand brilliant shafts of light.
‘Ineluctable modality of the visible,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I love you, and I’m glad we came here. It’s making me want to be a better person.’
‘Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say,’ said Millicent. ‘Maybe it’s that simple.’
‘Let’s stop smoking,’ I said.
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Sure.’ And just like that, we stopped.
We found a pub that made its own beer and served it in pint glasses. We stood and watched the cigarette smokers in the doorway, backlit, beautiful in the haze.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked Millicent.
‘Like an outsider.’
‘Missing it?’
‘No … Yeah. A little. But this is surprisingly OK.’
‘It is, isn’t it.’
We drank more. Winter-dark Steamer. Unfiltered IPA.
Max rang.
‘Hey, Max.’
‘Where are you, Dad?’
‘In a bar.’
There was a disapproving pause. ‘Are you and Mum drunk?’
‘No, Max, no, we’re not drunk. We’re just out having a good time.’
‘Why?’
I looked at Millicent. She shrugged, went to the bar. ‘We’ve been sorting a lot of things out, Max.’
‘What things?’
‘We’re better friends again, your mum and I.’
Another pause.
‘I thought you’d be glad, Max.’
Max said nothing, although I thought I heard him sigh heavily.
‘And we’ve decided to stop smoking.’
‘Really stopped, or just decided?’
‘Stopped. Completely stopped. Aren’t you proud of us?’
‘Dad, are you drunk?’
‘I’m not drunk.’
‘You don’t sound drunk, but what you’re saying is manipulative.’ He stretched out the word, as if he were testing it. Man-i-pu-la-tive. I wondered if this was shrink-talk, something from his sessions with Dr Å.
‘Manipulative how, Max?’
‘You’re trying to make me say good things to you. You think instead of talking about how you are making me feel bad I should be nice to you, because you say you’ve stopped smoking.’
‘I have stopped. We both have. I thought you’d be pleased.’
Millicent returned with beer.
‘I’ve decided something too.’
‘What, Max?’
‘I’ve got something to show you. It’s about Mum, and what she did. Bye.’
‘Max,’ I said, ‘are you OK?’
‘I’m fine.’ A complex accusation in a simple platitude.
‘I’m glad you’re fine, Max.’
Max sighed. ‘Bye, Dad.’
‘Bye.’
Max hung up.
‘So, what did they do today?’ said Millicent.
‘He’s fine. He told me.’ Millicent looked pained. ‘That’s good news,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it? Given how things could be?’
‘I guess,’ she said.
Is there any more, I wanted to say to her, anything that I don’t yet know? Because I don’t think I can take any more revelations. I need this to be our new beginning and our new reality. Because I’m happy now, and couldn’t bear to lose that happiness for a second time.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Alex?’ But I shook my head and raised my glass.
On we drank, and on: Oslo Pils and summer beer; honeyed ale and stout; porter – a very creditable porter; another round of IPA. We did not smoke. We did not once consider smoking. But we did watch the smokers; we watched, nostalgic, as strangers became friends over a cigarette in the impossible Nordic light.
The voicemail was from Caroline – I checked when Millicent was at the bar. Caroline didn’t say much: she could hear from the ringtone that I was abroad; she would call back. But there was a warmth to her voice that I hadn’t expected. Perhaps she isn’t going to be a problem for me after all.
Caroline, then.
Somewhere, almost out of sight now, is a remembered landscape. In that landscape there is no tiny house in Finsbury Park, and no Max, and no Millicent. It’s a younger, more vital me that picks his way through the bars of this desolate landscape: and in that looming, infinite London I am a charmer and seducer of women.
Caroline brought me up short, though. I had met her at a vodka party in a small brick-built country house in Somerset. Friend of a friend of a friend.
‘I do love to see the English upper-middle classes at play,’ I said. ‘Hello, by the way, I’m Alex.’
‘Caroline. My party. And I am not an upper-middle.’ Ringlets and freckles, small breasts: very posh.
‘Aristocrat?’
‘Not that it should matter.’
‘It’s all right, Caroline, I’m a bohemian,’ I said, trying to kiss her.
‘Does that line work with other girls?’
‘Only the real nobs,’ I said, pulling her to me.
‘You’re a disgrace,’ she said, biting my lower lip. ‘And you have those big, sad, beautiful eyes. Are you sure you’re a real bohemian?’
We had spent the rest of the night in the cornfield, fully clothed. I remember my surprise as she came, my tongue in her mouth, her cunt pressed hard against my belt buckle through her bias-cut dress. Caroline had shown no embarrassment afterwards, had invited me back the next weekend. I had declined. London, I had said. Much more my kind of place.
I was an idiot. I courted Caroline, I slept with her, and I dumped her. I liked her well enough: she was pretty and funny and clever, and she knew how to behave around my London friends. She hadn’t turned her nose up at my squalid little flat. But I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, and didn’t want to be weighted down. She went home one weekend to her brick-built house in the country, and I brought home a Daisy, or a Mirabelle, or a Chloe.
I didn’t h
ide the evidence from Caroline. I didn’t change the sheets. It was time she knew. She had silently and with great deliberation put her clothes back on, staring at me all the way. Then she collected her shoes from beside the door and returned to sit on the bed.
‘The trouble with you, Alex, is that there’s something broken in you. And you think, because of your brokenness, that you can behave like a complete shit, and that I’m fair game. And that brokenness is a real problem for me, because unfortunately it makes you something close to irresistible. And I don’t know what wrong you think you’re righting by hurting me, but I don’t deserve this.’
‘No, Caroline, you deserve a viscount.’
‘Oh, piss off. Grow up. I’m not the one with a problem.’
‘Because you’re slumming it here with me?’
‘No. Because you behaved as if you liked me, and that has moral consequences. I liked you back.’ She gave an angry little laugh. ‘It was more than that, actually, Alex. Much, much more than that.’ She was willing herself not to cry. But it was only later that I realised she was telling me she loved me.
‘How dare you, you know? You use the accident of my birth as a stick to beat me. I’m just English and stuck-up, and so are my friends, and that gives you free rein. Whereas I had thought, stupidly as it turns out, that you could see past that to something more like who I was. I thought you liked me, Alex. But really you don’t, do you?’
‘I do like you, Caroline.’
‘Your actions suggest my reading over yours, don’t you think?’
She pulled on her shoes and crouched down, negotiated the complex strapwork by touch, staring directly at me. I made to speak, but she stopped me with a shake of the head.
‘Don’t, Alex. Please don’t talk because you’re too good at it and I can’t let myself listen to you. The truth is that I’m nothing like the person you seem to think I am. I’m just as lost as you are. And I thought because you seem vulnerable and sensitive underneath that prickly Scottish carapace that you were sensitive to me and had seen something of yourself in me, and you aren’t, and you didn’t, and I’m completely and utterly heartbroken.’
She had walked out of my flat then.
I wondered for a long time what had made me treat her so badly. I didn’t much like her friends, but I liked her, far more than I’d realised. And she loved me. She had as good as told me so.
Caroline politely answered my phone calls, and just as politely refused to meet me. After a month I understood that she meant it, that she really was telling me no. I had humiliated her, and she would not forgive that.
I waited for Caroline on the street at the end of the working day. She asked me to leave, and went back inside the gallery where she worked. I could see her making a phone call, and shortly after that she came out and stepped straight into a taxi.
The non-molestation order stopped me cold. No one wants to be the man who is cruel to women. I spent months in desperate isolation. I slept with two women. One Claire, one Janet: both firmly within my class. Both times we agreed in advance that it was sex and nothing more. Clear boundaries, no expectations, from the start. For the first time in years I was honest with the women I slept with. I had never felt less fulfilled in my life.
And yes, I sought out a shrink, though it didn’t much help.
I will say this for myself, though: when Caroline forced me to face what I had done I stopped in my tracks. I paid attention. And I realised that I had allowed some angry and resentful shadow in my troubled Scottish soul to blind me to a simple truth: that Caroline had loved me, and that I had loved her.
And then came Millicent, and she was the saving of me.
PART THREE
Manifest Destiny
19
No police officer ever explained to me why they had to make the arrest in the middle of the night. We’re obedient people: we do what we’re told. There was no flight risk.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Max hugged me as I walked in through the door. He gave Millicent a dutiful kiss, then returned to the kitchen. Arla was letting him cook fish, and he stood quietly, spatula in hand, turning the fillets over in the hot oil. He looked up at Arla, who glanced down at the pan.
‘You did good, Max.’
Max nodded, and smiled. Arla put a hand on his shoulder. There was an intimacy between them that surprised me.
‘You’ve tidied up,’ I said.
‘We did. We tidied up. A little,’ said Arla.
‘It was rank,’ said Max.
‘It looks good,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘That’s OK. Have you really stopped smoking?’
‘Yes. Yes, I really have.’
‘Mum too?’
‘Don’t we smell a little better, honey?’
Max ignored Millicent. ‘Can we have wine with the food, Dad? Arla lets me.’
Millicent and I looked at Arla.
‘A half-glass,’ said Arla. ‘Fifty-fifty with water.’
‘Like in France,’ said Max.
‘Do you even like wine?’ said Millicent.
‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘I really do.’
Fried fish with rice. A tomato salad. ‘This is great, Max,’ I said as we ate. ‘Thank you.’
‘Arla helped,’ he said, but I could see the pride in him. As I smiled at Arla I sensed something angular and brittle in Millicent, some slight stiffening on the edge of my vision. Arla smiled back, and by the time I turned to Millicent, she was smiling too.
The doorbell rang. I got up to answer it, wineglass in hand.
‘What if it’s the police, Dad?’
Yes, I thought. What then? I put my glass down on the table.
‘Do you think it is, Dad?’ said Max.
‘I don’t know.’
I felt Millicent’s eyes on me. I nodded back at her. Courage, love. We fight this as a family.
It was Mr Ashani.
‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I heard you through the wall.’
‘Mr Ashani.’ Relief coursed through me.
‘Nice,’ he said. He reached out his hand. I took his hand in mine. His grip was as firm as ever. ‘Nice,’ he said again.
‘Nice,’ I said, then felt embarrassed and wished I hadn’t.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I wish to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I owe you my life.’
‘I didn’t do much,’ I said. Hadn’t he already thanked me?
‘Sir, but you did.’ He had not yet released my hand. ‘And your son, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘A fine boy.’ His eyes darted towards the kitchen, and I had for a moment a sense of a man playing to the gallery. ‘He is a credit to your wife, and to you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘What happened? Are you all right?’
He looked again towards door to the kitchen. I could hear voices, laughter. Millicent, Arla and Max were still sitting at the table. Mr Ashani leaned in close, across the threshold, still shaking my hand. He dropped his voice. ‘I must speak with you.’
‘That’s not terribly convenient,’ I said, lowering my voice to meet his. ‘Could we do it tomorrow?’
‘It is a matter of some urgency. And some delicacy.’
‘If it’s about my wife, I forgive her.’
A shrewd look passed across his features. He let go of my hand. ‘It is not about your wife. Not directly.’
He invited me loudly for a sherry, and I accepted just as loudly.
I sat waiting for Mr Ashani to return from the kitchen, worrying at a piece of nail on my right thumb, foolish and out of place. Mr Ashani’s front room was scrupulously tidy. Everything was old; everything immaculately preserved. There were few pictures; a small number of leather-bound books. A large Bible dominated the bookshelf, and a small wooden cross hung from a chain above the mantelpiece. The fireplace had been boarded up, and a small gas fire installed against the plasterboard.
I guessed Mr Ashani had bought his furniture when he moved in. It was upholstere
d in muted greens and blues. Clear plastic strips protected the arms of the chairs; the legs sat in shallow plastic cups; more plastic preserved the area of carpet around the door.
Mr Ashani returned with a glass, which he placed on a small table beside me. Cut crystal.
‘Aren’t you having one?’
‘Kind of you, sir, but no.’
I sat, looking at the sherry.
‘May I ask you an impertinent question, sir?’
‘Mr Ashani,’ I said, ‘it makes me uncomfortable when you call me sir.’
‘But we hardly know each other, sir.’
‘Mr Ashani, I’m sitting here, drinking your sherry. Would you please call me Alex?’
He leaned over and slammed his palm down on my knee. ‘Nice! Alex! Why not? But you must call me Emmanuel.’
‘And will you please join me in a drink?’
‘Why not?’
‘OK. Emmanuel. Thank you.’
He went back into the kitchen, and returned with another cut crystal glass, which he stroked gently as he sat, nursing it like a small and delicate animal.
‘Your good health, Alex.’
‘Cheers, Emmanuel.’
‘I am grateful for what you did, sir.’ He took an appreciative sip. ‘Exquisite.’
I said nothing. I took a slug of sherry. It was bitter, though I was certain that it was good sherry.
Mr Ashani leaned forwards and grasped my knee with his right hand, his eyes very close to mine. ‘I owe you my life, sir.’
‘I didn’t do much.’ I tried not to blink. There were small grey rings around his dark pupils. ‘It was Max who realised you’d been very quiet.’
‘A transient ischemic attack, sir.’ He relaxed his grip and sat back in his chair. ‘A mini-stroke, if you will. The doctors, they told me to avoid salt, and alcohol.’ He looked wryly at the glass in his hand. ‘But I believe the cause to be stress, so perhaps a little sherry cannot hurt. The death of our neighbour has caused me not a little distress. Now, what is it about your wife that you have forgiven?’
I said nothing.
A Line of Blood Page 22