Spring Tide

by Chris Beckett

  It was a beautiful September day when I drove down, with air as clear as newly cleaned glass, achingly blue sky, and trees just lightly brushed with gold, but I saw all of this through a complicated cage of painful feelings which had the effect of setting it beyond my reach and denying me the solace it might have given me, just when I needed it most. I was terrified of being told off. I was dreading the humiliation of being cross-examined and found incompetent or unprofessional, after so long in the job. I worried that perhaps I never really had been any good at this job I’d done all these years, and that my bluff had finally been called. I rehearsed every small mistake I’d ever made, every embarrassing gaffe. And over and over again, I imagined having to tell the kids that the life I’d given them was going to have to be dismantled. Without the job, we couldn’t keep the house. We couldn’t even live in the same area.

  Worry comes readily to me. I can put on a good impression of being calm and unflappable but the truth is that, even on an ordinary day, there are always a lot of things niggling away inside me, and I often find it hard to sleep. I guess when your husband suddenly kills himself, it does sap your confidence in your ability to control events. But actually I think I’d always been the worrying kind, even as a kid, and there were plenty of more recent things to worry about: Ben’s difficulties at school, for one, and my friend Carrie’s cancer, and my relationship with Harry that hovered all the time between being on and being off, and never quite settled either way. I worried a lot, but it was bad this time. This was the bedrock of everything that was under threat, and as I drove through the New Forest, I felt quite sick with fear.

  All around me, the warmth of the sun was making the heather steam. A herd of deer were grazing peacefully by a stream. But that was out there. That was for the happy people. It gave me no pleasure at all, no respite. It had nothing to do with me.

  •

  As I do when I’m anxious about a meeting, I’d set off ridiculously early so as to be absolutely sure of not arriving late. As a result, when I reached the far side of the forest, I realised I was only twelve miles from my destination with nearly two hours to fill before the meeting. To kill some time I pulled over at a Little Chef place, sat at a window table, and, after ordering a coffee, began to read through, yet one more time, the various papers that I’d brought with me: the documents from HR, my own statement setting out the somewhat flimsy extenuating circumstances I’d been able to scrape together, and a list I’d compiled of some of the important contracts I’d secured for our company over the years, by way of demonstrating that there was a positive side to my balance sheet.

  When the coffee arrived, I took a sip and, for a while, carried on looking through the papers. But I was getting quite panicky now. I really wasn’t taking in what I was reading, and I realised I’d just get myself into even more of a muddle if I went over it any more. So I pushed the papers away and took another sip of my coffee. I’d barely noticed the first sip, but second time round I felt the warm buzz as the caffeine entered my bloodstream.

  I put the mug down again and, as I did so, I noticed how the steam rising up from it caught the sunbeams streaming in through the window beside me, and it suddenly struck me that the sunbeams and the steam each made the other visible. I was sufficiently intrigued by this, that I began to experiment. When the steam rose through them, the parallel sunbeams that were revealed were as firm and steady as bars of metal, but if I gently blew the steam away, they disappeared completely into empty air, only to reappear when I stopped blowing and let the steam rise from the mug once more. I blew again, very gently – it only took the smallest puff – and watched the steam and the sunbeams vanish again, and then rapidly reassert themselves as the temporary agitation I’d created settled down. I stopped interfering after that, and just sat and watched the play of steam and light over my coffee, enjoying the sensation of the sun warming my skin as I sat by the window with the bright world outside. It was several minutes before I noticed I was completely at peace.

  At peace? Me? Surely not! But I prodded my feelings carefully, and it really seemed to be the case. The things I’d been worrying about hadn’t vanished, the dreaded meeting still lay ahead of me, the future was still full of uncertainty and threats to myself and the ones I loved, but even so, right then, I felt entirely content. It may seem an odd thing to say, but it was as if I’d suddenly remembered an ancient deal that was the basis of my existence, and could see that it was necessary and fair. You can have no mind at all and be completely at peace, as sunlight is, or steam, and that’s always an option, as my husband Dick proved: you can always revert to being inanimate matter. Or you can have a mind that knows it’s alive and is capable of pleasure and delight. But if you choose the latter, you have to pay the necessary price for it in vigilance and worry and suffering. No one can live in the Garden of Eden, even though it’s where we come from and where we’ll return. That’s why it’s so peaceful.

  Of course, there is only so much time you can spend watching steam and sunbeams and thinking profound thoughts. After a time, I got out my tablet and occupied myself with emails until it was time to go. I still felt quite cheerful, though, and, as I drove off I decided that, if I ever took it into my head to found a religion – if religions are ever founded by middle-aged sales managers with two kids and a boyfriend who won’t quite commit himself – the Little Chef restaurant on the A338 would definitely be one of its holiest shrines. People would come on pilgrimages there, so as to stare at the spot where the prophet Jenny experienced enlightenment. The area round the window would be roped off to ensure no one could sully the holy Formica table, or steal the sacred sauce bottle. The blessed laminated menu would have to be chained down.

  None of those pilgrims would experience what I’d experienced, though. Not in there. Not with pilgrims and tourists pushing and shoving for a view under the watchful and suspicious eyes of the official guardians of the shrine: ‘No photography please. You can buy a picture in the shop, if you want one!’ But the funny thing was that they’d experience similar peaceful moments at other times and in other places, maybe even quite frequently, and yet barely even noticed them. And so they’d still keep coming to look at the sacred sauce bottle in the hope of some kind of salvation.

  I was quite entertained for a while by these thoughts. I even imagined a Great Schism, when two rival Jennyist churches would fight for control of the Little Chef, while members of a small breakaway group insisted that the moment of enlightenment had actually occurred in the Burger King down the road. Next thing they’d be burning folk at the stake for denying that the beverage I drank here had, in some wonderful and inexplicable way, been quite literally transformed as it touched my lips, so that it ceased to be mere Little Chef coffee and became the elixir of eternal life. And then, of course…

  But now worry was starting to intrude again. I would soon be at company headquarters, parking my car, checking my hair and makeup, and gathering my things together for that lonely walk to reception and the dreaded waiting area. I’d had my interlude of peace, and now I had to deal with a threat to the conditions of my existence, as living creatures must. Fear began to gnaw inside me as I approached the outskirts of Bournemouth.

  As it turned out, the meeting didn’t go anything like as badly as I’d thought it would. My argument about all the business I’d brought in proved to be more persuasive than I’d dared to hope. We agreed that I had indeed made a very bad and costly mistake, but it wasn’t characteristic of me, and I’d contributed a good deal to the fact that our company was still afloat at all, in a difficult market, with new global competitors emerging all the time. We decided that I still had a lot to offer, but that perhaps my moment of carelessness was a sign that I needed a change. A different role was suggested to me, a more strategic role, but on the same pay as I was receiving now. There were still Ben’s problems at school to worry about, there was still Carrie’s possible cancer and all the clumsy heartache of my relationship with Harry. There was still the disti
nct possibility that the company itself would founder. But one threat, at least for the moment, had been warded off.

  The sky had clouded over a bit by the time I headed for home, as is often the case on autumn days which start out sunny. As I drove back up the A338, I passed the place where I’d stopped for coffee, but it was just an ordinary Little Chef now, like all the others, with the usual angel standing guard outside it, wielding a sword of fire.

  Aphrodite

  There was a sea running east to west between two big brown bodies of land. In the eastern part of the sea there were many islands, and among them one island in particular that was long and thin in shape. At one end of this island a holiday resort had grown up, with bright lights, discos, rows of restaurants and music thumping till dawn, at the other there was a village falling into decline at the foot of an extinct volcano.

  Thomas, who was going through a somewhat difficult time, had gone to the resort at first but was now in the village, eating a salad of tomatoes and goat cheese by himself, outside the small café where he’d rented a room, a place that also doubled as a general store. As Thomas munched, the big plane tree in the middle of the square was throwing long and somehow dreary shadows towards him over the cracked and oil-stained tarmac to remind him that the day was ending and the streets of this very quiet village would soon be empty and dark. A stooped old woman in black turned to stare at him as she hobbled past. He smiled and raised his hand in greeting, but her cold appraisal didn’t so much as flicker. This was not a welcoming place. Apart from one other, smaller café, there was nowhere else in it that he could go, and many of the houses were empty and boarded up. As the café proprietor replaced the empty bread basket with a full one on the chequered plastic tablecloth in front of him, a worm of doubt stirred in Thomas’s mind. Had it been a bad decision, coming here? Wasn’t he going to have a very dull and very lonely week?

  ‘There was an Irish woman here earlier, a young woman about your age,’ his host said. ‘Very pretty. She had arranged to meet some friends here for camping, but they missed their flight. It will be a couple of days before they join her, apparently. I offered her a room, but …’ he paused to give a comically bewildered shrug, ‘but she said she was going to sleep outside.’

  His name was Spiro and his rugged face kept reminding Thomas of a gone-to-seed version of Zorba the Greek, as played by Anthony Quinn. Thomas suspected that Spiro was well aware of the Anglo-Saxon stereotype of the earthy, sensual Mediterranean man, and consciously played the part: a Greek playing a Mexican actor playing a Greek. But then again Thomas knew that, when the worm stirred inside him, it always made him ungenerous and a little paranoid.

  ‘There’s a temple here, isn’t there? A ruined temple? I thought I’d go and look at it before the light goes.’

  ‘The temple of Aphrodite,’ Spiro winked broadly, ‘the goddess of love. It’s about two kilometres away, along that track just there.’

  The track led through a dry, open forest of pine trees and wiry scrub, the warm air heavy with resin and pulsating with the constant shrill scraping of millions of cicadas. After an outcrop of bare grey rock the track dipped down, and a side path branched off from it along a small wooded valley towards the sea. There was a clifftop down there, he knew, and below it a beach, which you could also access directly via a path from the village. But for now Thomas stayed on the main track as it climbed up again, past a metal shrine that smelled of honey, and began to skirt round the broad shoulder of that extinct volcano.

  The temple stood on a kind of terrace on the right-hand side of the track, with the wooded slope beyond it leading down to cliffs above the sea. There wasn’t much left of the building itself, just a stone floor, the bases of the columns round the edge, and on the near side, a couple of broken columns that still rose about a metre from the ground. In front of it was a rusty sign with an empty beer bottle at its foot. The sun was almost at the horizon, and a pathway of yellow light stretched across the sea towards the island. All around, in every direction, the cicadas kept beating out their unrelenting rhythm, like a million children shaking dried peas in yoghurt pots.

  Thomas sat on a piece of fallen column that lay a few yards on from the temple itself. The light faded much more quickly here than it would have done back at home, and in a short time, a warm, scented darkness had closed round him. But more light was on its way. The sea along the horizon was already silvery with moonlight and soon the moon had risen high enough above the mountain behind him to illuminate the temple’s broken columns, cast faint shadows over its pale floor, and transform the forest around it into a kind of stage set: empty still, but full of dimly lit places where characters would meet, and shadows where they would hide. Thomas noticed that he no longer felt that worm of doubt inside him. This was the world and he was in it. And that, for the moment, was enough.

  Then he noticed he wasn’t alone. Someone else had stepped out onto the stage, coming from the direction of the village. To begin with the stranger was merely a pattern in the patchwork of shadow and dim light, distinguishable from the rest only because it moved. He couldn’t see a face, or make out the colour of the clothes, but quite soon he could tell somehow that this was a woman, and he sat and watched as she took form, knowing that he himself would be invisible as long as he stayed where he was. In fact, she still hadn’t spotted him even when she stepped onto the floor of the temple, but he could see that she was about his own age, slender, athletic, and wearing the clothes of a tourist like himself, and he assumed she was the Irishwoman that Spiro had told him about. Perhaps the old Greek had pointed her this way.

  ‘Hi there,’ he called out, standing up. He’d been reluctant to separate himself from the shadows, but to hide any longer would just be creepy.

  ‘Oh hi. Jesus, you made me jump! I thought I was on my own.’

  Yes, she was certainly Irish.

  ‘Sorry, I should have spoken sooner.’ He walked towards her, stepping up onto the floor of the temple, worn shiny by two and a half millennia of feet.

  They were standing beside one of the broken columns now: man and woman, dimly lit in shades of grey. There was no black or white. Everything was provisional, everything on the point of dissolution.

  ‘I’m Siobhan. You’re must be the Englishman the café guy mentioned.’

  She reached out her hand. Their palms and fingers touched, suddenly firm and solid, and she looked up into his face with friendly but appraising eyes. He wondered if she was as aware as he was of the obvious narrative which the universe, perhaps with Spiro’s assistance, had set up for them.

  So where did you two first meet?

  Would you believe it, we met by moonlight in the Temple of the Goddess of Love.

  ‘Hi, I’m Thomas. I gather your friends have been held up?’

  ‘Yes, a couple of days.’

  ‘And you’re sleeping out in the open?’

  ‘I am. The others have got the tent.’

  ‘Are you short of money until your friends come? If so I could easily —’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s no hardship sleeping out when the nights are as warm as this.’

  ‘I guess not. I just wondered whether there was a problem because your —’

  ‘There’s no problem at all. And I’m looking forward to a couple of days by myself if I’m honest. I like being on my own.’

  Thomas nodded.

  ‘Me too.’

  He did like it, actually, if he was in the right frame of mind, but that was something he’d only recently learnt about himself, as he grew older and became very gradually better at separating out the question ‘what do I want?’ from ‘what, right at this moment, would be the easiest thing to do?’ He’d lately discovered, for instance, that he didn’t really enjoy staying up drinking until 4 in the morning, or hanging out in places where you couldn’t talk but only bellow like a beast. This had been the cause of an ugly row with the friends who’d come with him to the resort at the far end of the island, and was the reason he was
now here. It had all been rather unpleasant and, in retrospect, he could see he’d handled the whole thing very badly.

  ‘There isn’t much to do at this end of the island, is the only problem,’ he said. ‘The only things open in the village are Spiro’s café, and one other café that looks like it’s very much for locals only.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’ve kind of resigned myself to a very early bedtime. I’m hoping the journey will have worn me out enough to get me off to sleep.’

  ‘Well, why not have a drink with me back at the village before you settle down?’ would have been the obvious thing for Thomas to say at this point. It would have been a natural thing to do, in no way difficult or awkward, and certainly not pushy or overfamiliar. Arguably it would actually be rather unfriendly not to make the offer, given that it was very early in the evening to lie down to sleep, and Siobhan couldn’t retreat to a room as he could, or read a book by electric light. And what was more, Thomas liked Siobhan immediately. Not only was she very pretty – Spiro was quite right about that – but she projected a kind of lively curiosity that he found instantly appealing. He liked the fact that she was Irish too, and different in that small way from himself.

  But he didn’t suggest a drink all the same.

  ‘Well, nice to meet you, Siobhan. I’ve actually been here a while and I was just thinking of heading back.’

  He was surprised at himself. He could already see, without even the benefit of hindsight, that this was going to be one of those moments he would replay in his mind. I should never have walked away from that Irish girl, he knew he’d tell himself at lonely moments, perhaps even years from now. Stupid, of course, but it would happen. And never mind the distant future. What about this very evening, what about the prospect ahead of him, trying to fill the time by himself in that sad little village? He did like being on his own, it was quite true, but there were places where that worked, and places where it didn’t. A depressed and slowly dying village wasn’t a good setting for solitude.