by Adam Thorpe
Jack felt a sudden stiffening in his stomach. ‘Your boyfriend, is he?’
‘I think if I go back he’ll be my husband. That’s what he wants. Up to now he’s just my old friend. He’s called Toomas. It means a rock.’
‘You can trust him. Because you’ve known him since childhood.’
She nodded. ‘I shall work for the island radio. They’ve got some money, I’ll be paid a little. They want me to. It’s a community radio. I have a lot of ideas. I can study by correspondence, I know professors in Tartu.’
‘Not quite London.’
‘London’s all money,’ she said. ‘I miss the island.’
‘Like I’ll miss you and Jaan really, really badly. Unless I can visit?’
She shook her head. ‘That’s not the right deal,’ she said. ‘My life’s not a website. Either you’re a dad, or you are not one.’
He leaned forward, trying not to tremble, and rested his elbows on his knees.
‘I don’t want not to see Jaan ever again,’ he said, with a conviction that surprised him.
‘Tell you what, exactly, Mill?’
‘About Estonia.’
Milly and he were in Hayes, in the garden, sitting on the plastic chairs, noting the number of cat’s doings in the gravel and wondering whether the shiny little B&Q barbecue set on wheels was ever used. They’d been to the hospital. Because it was a Sunday, there were a lot of visitors and no medical staff apart from a couple of harassed nurses and a sister with a migraine. Milly was shocked by her mum-in-law’s state, and immediately felt bad that she’d been too caught up in work to see her earlier. They’d handed over to his dad mid-afternoon and come back to sort out the house a bit. Milly didn’t tend to vacuum herself at all, these days, and took to it with gusto, although she was wearing the type of dress that zipped up the side but looked as if it had been slid into like a glasses case. The house was pretty dirty. They’d brought along a Fortnum’s hamper to cheer Donald up, and a cooked free-range chicken for a late lunch.
She was flushed with virtue and vacuuming. It was a real sacrifice, losing her Sunday to Hayes. She did not like Hayes, except as a reminder of where her husband had come from, which always made her feel better – about him, particularly: she tended to forget he was a working-class boy. A gifted working-class boy. Knowing this Hayes effect, even though he found it ludicrous, Jack had calculated that this was the best environment in which to make his confession. He had no option.
Milly wanted a kid, right? Jaan could be her stepson! Weekends, high days, holidays. Whenever. Fun. Milly was a generous, right-on person who thought about the planet and the poor, about asylum seekers and child labourers. She’d spent six months in a revolutionary Berlin commune while he was in The Hague behaving himself. She’d worked in the kitchens in Action Space. In a village in Zimbabwe, even, while he was analysing 12-tone rows in Luigi Dallapiccola. She’d keep reminding him, apropros of nothing, that one in four kids in the UK lived below the poverty line – or perhaps reminding herself because it was very easy to forget, nobody mentioned it except the leaflets through the door that tended to go binward. She had an open and honest mind.
The trouble is, she’d got there first. By a few minutes, probably.
‘About Estonia,’ Milly repeated. ‘Tell me all about Estonia.’
‘Yup. Actually, um –’
Lees was being screamed for somewhere nearby on the estate. Jack wished Lees would reply. Lees was like himself, perhaps, unable to find the words. A plane from Heathrow went over, almost low enough to identify the airline. Pushing its shadow of noise.
‘I’ve had my heart broken twice,’ Milly said. ‘Once by the boy I knew before you –’
‘Firuz,’ he nodded. ‘No, Saleem.’
‘And once when I lost my baby that I loved so much even though I hadn’t ever seen him alive.’
‘Right,’ said Jack. ‘In fact, funny you should ask.’
The air glared, suddenly, as the sun bit through the thin sheet of cloud and bounced off the white table, and they simultaneously donned their shades. He didn’t know how to begin.
‘I feel,’ continued Milly, ‘I’m going to have it broken a third time.’
‘Why?’
‘I think you’ve lied to me.’
Her face under the sunglasses was not friendly. She didn’t suit sunglasses, in fact. Jack could see his own tiny head in each lens, crossed by a black stripe like a blindfold.
‘Not exactly,’ he countered, in the same way he’d once denied having eaten his mother’s Dairy Milk some thirty-five years ago on this very spot. ‘Let me say my bit, then you can judge.’
She muttered something that was drowned by a passing car with woofers designed to perturb the deepest rhythms of the body. It accelerated with a whine, belted round the cul-de-sac and left on a squeal of tyres. Lees had been located, though.
There was relative silence, aside from the murmur of Middlesex. He felt out of breath.
‘About Estonia,’ she said, again.
‘Yup. You reckon I didn’t just walk round a lot of museums and churches and bogs. Six years ago.’
He could still retract. He could still pretend he wanted to thrash this thing out in order to clear his name. He could compose something detailed enough to persuade her for good. He was stroking the plastic table as he’d do as a boy – not the same plastic table, but its facsimile. The estate houses were crouched around them, brown-brick listening boxes, their upper windows jammed against the guttering, the roofs pulled down like caps as far as the eye could see, polka-dotted by satellite dishes. This was all a mistake.
‘You tell me,’ she said.
The silent space between them was a racket, in fact – drums, trombones, piccolos.
‘Well, OK, I’ve had this feeling for a while now,’ he said, eventually, ‘that all this … it would all be better … in the open.’
‘This is so incredibly scary.’
‘Look, give me a chance, Mill.’
She stared down at the table. Or seemed to be doing so, through her black aviator shades. He couldn’t be quite sure; her eyes might be swivelled up, staring at him.
‘You’ll get it off your chest. Feel better about it. And what about me.’
‘We ought to go inside,’ he suggested, hearing the neighbour – a wiry old bird called Daphne – coughing beyond the fence.
‘I’m going to have to leave you.’
‘Right. I haven’t even said anything and you’re going to leave me. Try to keep your voice down.’
‘Sorry, put that in another way,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to leave me.’
Daphne coughed again, as if she was actually in the garden.
‘OK,’ he said.
‘That’s all?’
‘No. Yes: I wish I could see your eyes.’
‘Ditto.’
She took off her sunglasses and her eyes were wet and slightly red around the lids. He kept his on, because his eyes refused to be wet. A head popped up above the fence on the road side, shocking him. A girl, her hair scraped back tight in what was known locally as a Harlington facelift, grinned and called out, ‘Oi, there’s two of ’em!’ Then she disappeared, squealing with hysterics along with her hidden friends.
‘Let’s go inside.’
Perched on the arm of the sitting room’s leatherette sofa, he felt his face pucker like a little boy’s – but there were no tears. Milly was hugging her knees on the thick carpet in front of the fireplace. She had vacuumed its artificial coals, stuck like giant boiled sweets in exactly the same position for as long as Jack could remember. Her side-lace sneakers were laid in front of it, like prim twins. She was waggling her toes.
‘I think you should, y’know, hear the defence,’ he said.
‘What? That you shagged this bimbo Katia or Kayak or whatever her name is and then – oh bugger,’ said Milly, putting her hands up to her face, turning white before his very eyes. ‘Oh my God oh my God.’
‘What?’<
br />
‘The prodigy. Howard’s prodigy. Who came to the house with her, Edward said. He is, isn’t he? Oh my God.’
Milly looked straight at him, her mouth open. He nodded his head slightly, unable to articulate words. His mother had thrown herself out of the window. His wife was going to throw him out of the house. It was so weird, the way life could turn turtle from one moment to the next.
‘A child,’ said Milly, in a high voice. ‘Well done. Ten out of ten.’
‘Mill, Mill, Mill. Please.’
‘Oh fuck.’
‘A complete accident. That’s what I was trying … you know …’
‘I’m sure it was,’ said Milly, her brow pitted with anguish. ‘I’m sure she’s not the only one. Oh fuck.’
He insisted there weren’t any others, but now the truth didn’t even convince him.
Milly said, ‘I’ve hoovered your parents’ pissing place from top to pissing bottom.’
‘It’s not very big,’ he pointed out.
She laughed. No, she was crying, into her hands. He explained everything over the moaning noises, setting it out clearly just as he’d rehearsed it over and over in his study, like a recitative. The trouble is, it still sounded like a rehearsal: how he’d been lonely and done a stupid thing all those years ago, how it was finished the next day, how he knew what Milly felt, how he loved her to bits, how he felt nothing for Kaja. But he had to do his duty and be a dad to Jaan. On weekends, say, like loads of other people did. Loads of their friends. Diego, Rupert, Barnaby, Nick. There were others but he couldn’t bring their names to mind. Her moaning stopped after he stopped. She was breathing hard.
Then she said: ‘I feel like pinching you with my nails until you die. I feel like drawing your teeth out one by one with a pair of metal – those big pincer things. I really do.’
‘Pliers,’ he said, helpfully.
Lees was lost again, or still not located, or still fast asleep. The voice was screaming it, now, surprisingly clear through the open windows. Then it stopped. His skin and his teeth felt tender and vulnerable.
She turned her face to him. Her eyes were very red, very swollen, and she hadn’t got a tissue. He went off to search for one in the kitchen and in the bathroom. He felt really narked with his dad for not having any tissues. He tore off a length of pink loo paper, folding it carefully, carrying it to her like a cup of the finest porcelain.
‘Thanks,’ she whispered.
There was a small silence that he felt he could roll in his hand, this time, like a ball bearing, as Milly dealt with her nose and eyes.
‘I feel bricked up,’ she said, at last, examining the sodden ball of paper. ‘Like one of those nuns.’
‘Honestly, Mill, it was just this one little … this tiny fling thing … can hardly even remember it … Got completely drunk, in fact. That was the problem. Blitzed. Stupid local vodka. Tallinn vodka. You know? Naive. Quick fix,’ he added, with a rueful grimace, pretending to be ruefully honest.
She said nothing. His words hung out into space. Thankfully, because they were rotten, they eventually snapped and fell into the depths for ever.
There had been brief times before in their marriage when, after a row, Jack would sleep in his study and they’d behave like polite strangers for a few days, bar the occasional burst over something trivial like leaving the loo seat up or propping a jam-stained knife against one of the cooker rings.
Even now, Jack had not been thrown out onto the pavement, his bag flying after him, with Edward Cochrane looking on bemused and pigeons flapping up from the road in alarm and disappearing into the sky. Jack played out this scene in his mind many times, half wishing it would happen. Instead, there were three days of the old polite avoidance. Everything buttoned tight: most of all Milly’s expression.
She spent a lot of the time at Claudia’s, when she wasn’t at work. Work could do without her, it seemed. Clients blithering about grey water recovery and composting toilets went silent. Yurts folded themselves up in quiet fields. Entire projects – even the teetering Oxford one – were put on hold. This struck Jack as mysterious. Milly’s work was like a great mansion, suddenly deserted. He drank too much coffee and had nightmares, if he slept at all.
He phoned Kaja, to check that Monday in Kensington Gardens was still on. He didn’t say anything more. He didn’t phone anyone else. His only students were Yeh and Raj, for the moment. He answered emails curtly, ‘in haste’, giving the impression he had loads of work. Then he worked out how to use the Out of the Office option. It amused him, using this.
On Tuesday evening Milly walked a long time on the Heath, by herself. She’d already made arrangements with her parents to stay down at Wadhampton Hall for at least a week, not telling them the reason. Jack set off half an hour later and, across a meadow of plumey grasses shedding seed like smoke, recognised Milly’s dark hair and the way she strode purposefully along, swinging her arms. Then he really did feel a sense of the unbelievable complexity of what he still could not quite accept he might be losing. She had phoned her old girlfriend Sammy in Devon, a very long call in which he feared that any lingering doubts about her action in Milly’s mind would have been dispersed, because Samantha Carlisle and Jack Middleton had never got on. More worryingly, he’d overheard her equally long conversation with Claudia, after which Milly had let him know that Roger was in a serious condition. Jack didn’t fancy visiting, since he felt lightly concussed himself.
He might never cross the threshold of Wadhampton Hall again, might never even see Marjorie and Richard again, who would be very cross with him. Milly might go for a divorce and he might lose the lot. He dug himself into his own drama as far as he could go, but it didn’t yield him the comfort of more than a very shallow self-pity that mutated at times into a pitiable, sustained note of remorse. The trees and shrubs on the Heath went on being trees and shrubs. The trees had enough to do just keeping alive, but this is not how he had thought when he was eighteen or nineteen. Then, he had thought the trees were at one with him, like the white clouds.
Milly didn’t get back till well after dark. He was not listening to Schubert or Chopin or Britten or Berio but watching junk TV on cable. She refused to speak with him and went straight upstairs, leaving a whiff of spirits and expensive cigarettes. The game-show host, in his glittery jacket, waved at him personally with a mocking smile.
Things were complicated by a phone call from his father, who made out that Mum wasn’t doing that well, although there was no need to panic, and since he would rather have Jack’s brother and sister fly over when or if the situation worsened, he would appreciate it if Jack could stay over one or two nights in the week.
‘You can always do your work here, John,’ his father added, who had no idea what composing involved.
He sounded a little desperate, and was surprised when Jack seized on the possibility of escaping Willow Road on the back of a perfectly valid and even admirable excuse. ‘Six nights, tops, Dad.’ Maybe things would resolve themselves – battered and seasoned, perhaps, but not used up. It reminded him of the lovely chunk of pale timber he and Kaja had found on the long white beach at the northern edge of Haaremaa, where the only other living creatures were a pair of sandpipers on spindly legs.
The next day – the day before Milly was due to leave for Hampshire – Jack went down to Hamleys and bought a child’s cricket set in a clear plastic case. The ball was an imitation in rubber, the bat made of some pale wood that was probably pine rather than willow, with County Cricket printed in blue on the back. There were four stumps and one double bail. It was the most junior set he could find.
This purchase cheered him up. He came back into the house knowing it would be empty: Milly had been out till late on previous days. They had said about ten words to each other since Hayes. Milly had gone into a kind of autism, had taken a vow of silence like the nun she’d compared herself to. It was a strain. He’d been rebuffed a couple of times, when he’d tried to make an approach. The first time she’d sai
d, ‘Right now, I think I might be incredibly close to a nervous breakdown. Give me time.’
The second attempt was met with: ‘Get some help.’
It was already the hottest recorded autumn ever, they were saying. The lawn was sprinkled all over with bright yellow leaves, which was normal. Will the gardener was not due till the end of the week, but the leaves kept on descending. Sweeping them made no difference. He whistled Janáek’s ikadla – the beetroot got married, the carrot danced, tidli tidli tidli – as he screwed the stumps in.
It was not easy, the ground was still dry and quite hard: the wicket stayed a bit drunk. He practised his bowling. He tried overarm at first, beamers every time, but the ball went nowhere near the stumps. He hadn’t bowled in about twenty-five years. Underarm was more successful, although the wicket was junior size and he mostly missed it. He wished he had a fielder, it was tiring retrieving the ball each time and walking back to where he’d placed the extra stump. But he had to practise: he didn’t want to make himself look stupid in front of Jaan, or the numerous visitors to Kensington Gardens.
To take the nails out of my hands and feet.
He tried overarm again and a perfect leg-cutter jumped towards the slips and rolled into the black shade of a wooden trellis that ‘Eeyore’ Graham at the Hall had knocked up for them out of antique beams. It was overgrown with passion flower, piled and coiling down. In the summer, the open flowers were dotted about like happy white stars on the deep green; now it was a golden-yellow mess with dark dangling withered bits like dried cat’s doings.
To his surprise, the ball flew out again with great force, as if it had bounced off something elastic.
He removed his sunglasses and the blackness under the passion flower lightened, revealing what he thought at first was an upright wheelbarrow. Will liked using the wheelbarrow, as he liked to make bonfires, and was always leaving it about. With a jolt to his blood supply Jack realised the wheelbarrow was, in fact, a human form, crouched or perhaps seated on the bench under the trellis. He picked up the little bat, just in case.