What did I feel? Relief? And then futility, anger, Schadenfreude. I remembered the telephone call that Flora had refused to take. Louise and I haven’t spoken since you left. I blame her as much as I blame you, of course; but her betrayal is different, worse, perhaps. Louise has always been my voice of reason, or, if not that, a different opinion—someone who will question my choices, make me defend myself. Not only has Louise slept with you, had an affair, fallen in love (whatever its name)—she’s changed sides.
“So tell me about this house,” I said.
“I’ve been thinking of getting rid of the tenants from my mother’s old house and doing it up. Going back to Ireland to settle down. Maybe I can find a job teaching in a school or somewhere.”
“It’s about time. How old are you? Fifty-three?”
“Fifty-two. Bloody hell, how can I be fifty-two? I’m tired of travelling. You’d love the house. Plenty of space for the kids.”
“They’re fifteen and nine. It’s not space they want anymore. It’s time away from their mother.” I laughed.
“Well, there you are then.” He topped up my glass. “Bantry Bay is beautiful when it’s not raining. The house just needs some patching up, a lick or two of paint.”
“You should find yourself a wife.” We smiled.
“There’s nothing to keep you and the children in England. Just decide and come with me. You could make a garden and I could write.”
It sounded frighteningly familiar.
“You once told me to stay with Gil when I was thinking about leaving.”
Jonathan looked unbearably sad. “See, that’s why you should never listen to my advice. What do I know about what happens inside a marriage?”
“I sometimes think you know more about it than Gil and me, or at least you’re able to take a more objective view.” I cupped the side of his face with my hand. He closed his eyes, pressed his cheek against my palm, and the moment lengthened until he snapped his eyes open and pulled away from me.
“Fuck Gil,” he said, raising his glass.
“To Ireland,” I said. “I’ll pack up the house, pack up the girls, and move out.” It was the drink talking, making plans without my brain being asked.
Jonathan waved his glass towards the bar again and poured me more wine.
“Thank you for the offer, Jonathan,” I said, concentrating on my words, which wanted to run together. “I really appreciate it. Will you do something else for me, too?”
Jonathan shifted across the table and held my hands in his. “Anything.”
“If something should happen—you know, to me—promise you’ll keep an eye on Nan and Flora.”
“What do you mean? What’s going to happen?”
I stared at him until he said, “OK, I promise.”
When we got up to leave I staggered, catching myself against the table. The barmaid was sitting on a stool, waiting for us to leave. Two plaits of yellow hair lay coiled on the bar beside her.
“Are you drunk?” Jonathan said.
“Of course I’m bloody drunk,” I said. “You made me drink a whole bottle of wine, plus what we had at dinner.”
“I think you need some coffee,” he said. “Come on, upstairs.”
Jonathan took me to my room and sat me on a wooden chair in the corner against another heart-shaped hole and kneeled to take off my shoes. I bent forwards, meaning to kiss his forehead, but he jumped up. “Coffee,” he said, and picked up the kettle from the tray on the unit opposite the bed. He shook it and went into the bathroom. I got up, steadied myself, and followed him. The tiny space had been tiled with pictures of edelweiss and hearts which swirled together. Jonathan jumped when I stood behind him and put my arms about his chest, and when I looked around his shoulder his eyes met mine in the bathroom mirror. “I can’t do this, Ingrid,” he said. It hadn’t occurred to me that we were doing anything until he said it.
“Why? Don’t you want to?”
He left the kettle in the sink, turned around, and put his hands on the tops of my arms.
“It would be wrong.” He sounded sober.
“But downstairs you said we should live together in Ireland.”
“Not like that, though. You’re still married.”
“So you don’t want me, either.” I went back to the bedroom.
From the bathroom’s doorway Jonathan said, “Come on, Ingrid. Don’t get all maudlin on me. It’s wine you’ve been drinking, not gin.” He laughed. “Let me make you some coffee.”
He sat on the edge of the bed drinking a minibar whiskey. I sat in the chair holding a cup and saucer on my lap.
“Drink it up,” he said. “I might even make you have another.”
“Oh, please don’t. I’ll be peeing all night. Look.” I turned the cup over the saucer and shook it; a couple of drops came out. “See, all gone.” I got off the chair and onto my knees, put the cup and saucer down, and inched the two feet across the carpet.
I know, Gil, you don’t want to read this. But you have to, every word. No skipping or skimming; this, my love, is your punishment. All I ask is that afterwards you break that stupid rule of yours and you remove these letters from their books and get rid of them. (More things our children mustn’t read.)
This is what happened—the facts, the reality. I’ve always found that reality is so much more conventional than imagination. And over the years I’ve imagined far too many things: your women, your places, your actions.
Jonathan’s knees were together; I opened them and kneeled in the space between. I took his glass of whiskey and put it on the floor behind me, and then I kissed him. He tasted of alcohol and sweetness; of the first spoonful of Christmas pudding after the flame has gone out. I hadn’t kissed another man for more than sixteen years.
He pulled away but I took his bottom lip in between my teeth and bit, gently. I lifted my dress over my head, undid my bra, stood up and took off my knickers. I waited in front of him naked, and he held my buttocks and pulled me to him, pressing his face between my legs and breathing me in, long, deep breaths. It was me who had to break away then, had to reach out to pull his shirt from his trousers and unzip him. Everything we did, the kissing, the undressing, the touching, everything was done slowly, as if at any time we were allowed to change our minds. Neither of us did. And when he came inside me as I sat astride him, his hands on my breasts, I watched his old familiar face from the perfect angle, and not once did I think of you.
In the morning I was woken by the click of the hotel door closing. The empty space beside me was still warm. Jonathan had left a note on the pillow:
I told you I couldn’t do this. I’m going to see Gil to get him to meet you at the Swimming Pavilion. Go home to your husband.
Jonathan x
PS—Sorry about Ireland.
I am grateful that he felt you and I, our marriage, our family, were more important than his flight to Addis Ababa, more important than anything he and I could’ve had together, but I don’t deserve it, any of it. I never meant for this to be my life.
Time, tomorrow, for one more letter.
Ingrid
[Placed in The Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann David Wyss, 1812.]
Chapter 43
They left Gil sleeping, still wearing the pink dress and with an empty glass beside him. Gabriel turned the music down, and Jonathan took the bottle with a drop of whiskey remaining out to the veranda. The rain stopped and the eaves dripped onto the rail and splashed onto the weeds below.
Jonathan lifted a fat hand-rolled cigarette from the top pocket of his shirt and held it out to Flora.
“I brought this for Gil, but perhaps the whiskey has done the same trick. You should have it.”
She took it from him, rolled it between her fingers, and held it up to her nose: the faintest whiff of tobacco and marijuana, waves of dusky orange.
“Or smoke it now. Why don’t you and Gabriel take it to the beach?”
Flora looked at Gabriel, who shrugged. She stared at the window
into the bedroom.
“Go on,” Jonathan said. “He’s sleeping. He’s fine, and Nan will be home soon.”
Richard had phoned to say he had discovered a muddy and wet Nan on the promenade in Hadleigh. She’d got a lift in a passing van halfway there and walked the rest of the way across the fields. Nan had gone to find Viv, but a notice was pinned to the door saying the bookshop was closed due to staff illness, and Nan didn’t know where Viv lived. Richard said he would take her for a warm drink and then drive her home.
Flora stood up, still hesitating. There was something she was meant to tell Jonathan, something that Nan would have said, but she couldn’t remember what it was.
“Do you want to come to the beach again?” she said to Gabriel. “Where we went last time?”
They sat on the rocks at the bottom of the chine and looked out at the sea, grey and choppy in the wind. A couple of boys were lobbing stones into the waves. It was chilly, the tide was in, and only pebbles and a strip of seaweed showed along the edge of the water.
“I was sorry to hear about your mother,” Gabriel blurted out. “Her disappearance, I mean.” He hugged himself and blushed. “I still think of that afternoon I spent with the two of you. I should have got in touch but I wasn’t sure it would be welcome.”
They watched the boys flicking seaweed with sticks and bending to poke at whatever it was they had found underneath.
“What do you think about smoking this?” Flora said, holding the joint up.
“Yes, sure,” Gabriel said. “Do you have any matches?”
“Shit,” Flora said. “I don’t suppose you do? What was the point of Jonathan giving it to us without matches? Do you think those boys might have a light?” One of them picked something up with two fingers, yelling with delight and disgust as he threw it at his friend.
“Here.” Gabriel took the cigarette and put it in his mouth. At the twisted end he formed his hand into a fist and flicked his thumb up. He inhaled and closed his eyes. He pushed his heels into the pebbles and took the joint out of his mouth. Still holding his breath, he said, “Strong stuff.” Flora smiled, and he passed it to her. She put the unlit joint between her lips and breathed in.
“I used to tell Nan stories about you after we’d gone to bed,” she said, holding the joint in her fingers. She bent to pick up a pebble, dull and brown. “What you looked like, what you were doing, stupid stuff, like maybe you were in a band and we had a pop-star brother. She was so jealous she never got to meet you.”
“I’m looking forwards to meeting her now.” He took the joint, let it hang from his mouth.
“I would pretend that you had visited us again and played your guitar on the veranda.” Flora licked the pebble and ran her thumb across it. The matt surface sprang to life, a rich brown threaded through with veins of red. “No one ever told us what happened,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “To make Daddy behave like he did.”
“It’s a simple story,” Gabriel said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth. “He and my mum went out with each other for a few weeks. She got pregnant. He was really into it for a while, apparently, read all the books he could get hold of, but he wanted to get married and she didn’t, she didn’t buy into all that conventional settling-down stuff he wanted. And so he denied the baby—me—was his, said she must have slept with someone else, and then left.
“She hadn’t, of course. But she wasn’t bothered. We were happy, only the two of us. She wouldn’t tell me who my father was for years, but I wheedled it out of her in the end. And when A Man of Pleasure came out, she made me promise not to go and see him. I didn’t listen. But once was enough.”
“I’m sorry,” Flora said. “Here.” She took the joint from him.
“You don’t have to apologise.”
They were silent while the boys ran past them and up the chine.
“A week or so ago it rained fish,” Flora said. “When I was driving home from the ferry. There was a massive storm and loads of little mackerel fell onto the car and the road.”
“Fish?” Gabriel said, and was quiet for a moment. “Maybe it was a sign that something was going to happen—or,”—he touched her arm,—“maybe it was a sign that something had already happened—that your mother had come back.”
“I don’t know about that anymore,” she said. She nudged him with her shoulder and laughed. “But I think I’m going to like having a brother.”
Gabriel laughed, too, took the cigarette, and said, “I think this stuff is working.”
“It is,” Flora said. “I can almost smell it. And I can hear music.” She sat still, listening. On the wind there was the beat of a distant song.
“I can hear it, too,” Gabriel said.
It was then that Flora turned her head to glance up the steep bank beside the chine, where, if you knew what to look for, the outline of her mother’s zigzag path remained. The house was too near the lane to be glimpsed from sea level, and the writing room was out of sight, too. Only the nettles at the top were visible, and beyond them, in the grey sky, plumes of a darker grey billowing upwards. Smoke.
Chapter 44
THE NUDIST BEACH, 2ND JULY 1992, 2:17 PM
Gil,
I’m sitting on the beach. I’ve been delaying writing my final letter, and thinking about all the others already written and hidden in your books.
Remember your first class, with the jam jar and the daffodil? You asked for our darkest, most private truths. And so here at last, in all these words, have been mine.
When you find this letter, when you find the rest of them, don’t forget that you must destroy them all, tear them up, throw them away, burn them; don’t leave them for the girls to read.
I know you’re on your way home; Jonathan rang to tell me. I’m sorry, but this time I won’t be there.
This morning Nan promised to make sure her sister got on the bus and went to school. Flora has her packed lunch (two slices of bread buttered up to the edges and a piece of Red Leicester, but the cheese mustn’t be inside the bread or she won’t eat it). You need to keep an eye on her; she’s spirited and that’s a good thing. I think she’ll be OK—Flora has you, and you have her. Nan, too, will be fine, I’m sure. Just don’t let her become the carer, the do-er, the little mother, a role I know she could slip into so easily. Let her go off and be free.
Weed the garden for me now and again, mow the lawn. And don’t forget your other children, Gabriel and George, and the two others, unnamed and unknown. Six. You were right, in a way.
So, one last swim out, level with the buoy, or maybe a little farther.
I.
[Placed in Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, by Barbara Comyns, 1954.]
Chapter 45
Flora remembered being ahead of Gabriel running up the chine, but then she was behind him, watching his arms pump as he sprinted into the lane. When she ran onto the drive, the music was so loud it was distorted, unrecognizable, but even through that there was the sound of water splattering on tarmac and her first thought was that everything was all right because it was raining again. But it was the noise of flames eating wood.
Gabriel was already at the door of the Swimming Pavilion. The window of the front bedroom glowed orange and a lick of flame crept out from under the roof.
Flora stood on the bottom step. “Daddy!” she shouted, and “Jonathan!” The glasses and the cups were still on the table with the whiskey bottle, empty now. One of the chairs had tipped against the railing and there were tiny drifts of sand under the table, and she knew Nan would want her to sweep them up. With a high-pitched crack, the glass in the front door crazed and fell out. Gabriel ducked as flames belched through the hole. Flora heard the music even louder: Townes Van Zandt singing about rain and roses, and then it stopped. “Daddy!” she screamed.
“Get back! Get back!” Gabriel ran off the veranda in a crouch. “Call the fire brigade,” he shouted. Black smoke billowed from the door and through the tin panels on the roof where they were joined togeth
er, high into the air, blowing over Spanish Green, away from the sea. The windows in the sitting room shimmered. Flora patted her shorts pockets, searching for her phone, but only finding the soldier and the unlit joint.
“I haven’t got my phone,” she shouted as she followed Gabriel, who was running around the side of the house. The bedroom windows popped and shattered when he passed them, as though a sniper were following him and firing.
“Get mine!” he yelled. “In the car! It’s in the car.” He put his arm up over his face and went closer to Flora’s bedroom window. She ran to the car, pulled on the door. Locked. She stared at the house. The flames roared and crackled, pouring out of the burst windows like liquid, as if gravity or the whole world had turned upside down. Inside the house she heard an explosion and yellow fire surged up through the apex of the roof. Flora took two steps away from the heat, and then Gabriel came running back.
“The keys, Gabriel,” she shouted. “Where are the keys?”
“Shit.” He pulled them out of his pocket, aimed the fob at the car and pressed, pressed again until the car beeped.
And then Jonathan was there with Louise.
“Oh, thank God,” Flora said. “You’re safe.” She clung to him. “You’re all safe. I thought Daddy was in the house.” She almost laughed.
“Fuck!” Jonathan shouted, shoving Flora towards Louise and running forwards, tripping, righting himself. “Fuck!” The front of the house was a leaping, curling rush of fire, each strut and beam in the veranda backlit by dancing, crackling orange.
“Where’s Daddy?” Flora said. “You must have Daddy with you.” Louise put her phone back in her pocket. Flora grabbed her jacket. Yelled in her face, “Where’s Daddy?”
“I’ve called the fire brigade,” Louise said. “They won’t be long. I promise you, Flora, they won’t be long.” She held Flora up under her arms. “We were in the pub,” Louise said. “Just for a quick sandwich. Ten minutes. Twenty at the most.”
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