by Pat Barker
‘This must be where Adam found the badger,’ he said.
‘Just back there. Beth doesn’t like him coming this way on his own.’
‘It’s a long way.’
‘I know I wouldn’t want him coming here if he was my kid. If animals can’t see the cars coming, how can he?’
Gradually, the trees thinned and they left the forest behind. Searching for something to talk about, he asked if any of her friends were taking a gap year, and had she ever thought of doing that herself? Yes, but she’d decided against it. Apparently medical schools weren’t keen on the idea. ‘They think you go off the boil,’ she said. ‘And they’re probably right.’ Her voice, which had been husky and constrained, became clearer and more confident as she spoke. She was having an unintended year off and she’d certainly gone off the boil. Brains turned to mush.
‘You’ve been ill, remember.’
‘Yeah, but I’m all right now.’
‘What you need is a few new experiences.’
‘Yes.’ She sounded amused.
A slight tension returned when he stopped the car on the road outside the vicarage, a tall, narrow, Georgian house with gables set back from the village green behind a copse of trees. He walked round to open the door for her.
Standing together in the sudden cold, they looked at each other directly for the first time. The moonlight caught the whites of her eyes. Something stirred in him, something nameless and irrational and a lot less healthy than lust. He smelled the stairwell in Sarajevo, and dragged cold air into his lungs. Her mouth was slightly open.
‘Yes, well,’ he said, taking a step back.
‘See you.’
She raised her hand, and walked rapidly away up the path. The front door released a sliver of golden light on to the trampled snow, and then she was gone.
Ten
Stephen woke next morning to find the excitement of the previous evening vanished and replaced by depression. He’d made a fool of himself. The worst of it was he was still attracted to her, but there was nothing he could do about it. She could come or not as she chose. He certainly wasn’t going to pursue her.
The sense of new possibilities beginning to open up had disappeared. At nine, long after he should have started work, he was still slumped in an armchair, brooding over the failure of his marriage.
11 September 2001. Not a date anybody was likely to forget and many people had far worse personal reasons for remembering it than he had. On that day, having any kind of personal crisis seemed selfish, and yet of course they happened. People fell in love, or out of love, or down flights of badly lit stairs, got jobs, lost jobs, had heart attacks and babies, stared at the shadow on an X-ray, or the second blue line on a pregnancy-testing kit.
When he closed his eyes, Stephen’s brain filled with images of shocked people covered in plaster dust. Grey dust blocking his nostrils, caking his eyelids. Gritty on the floor of the hotel lobby, trampled up the stairs and along the corridor to his room, where the television screen domesticated the roar and tumult, the dust, the debris, the cries, the thud of bodies hitting the ground, reduced all this to silent images, played and replayed, and played again in a vain attempt to make the day’s events credible: the visual equivalent of what you heard repetitively on the street: Christ, Holy shit, Oh my God.
Sometime after midnight, too fuddled with tiredness and drink to remember the time difference, he phoned Nerys. The phone rang perhaps twenty times. Running his tongue round his mouth, he found pieces of grit lodged between his teeth, though He’d just finished brushing them. He sat on the bed, watching the second plane strike, and hoped his voice would sound normal. She came on the phone yawning. ‘Nerys, it’s me.’ When there was no reply, he went on, ‘I was just wondering how you are.’
‘Stephen, I tried to ring. I couldn’t get through.’
‘No, the lines were jammed.’
Silence. He imagined her breasts in the moonlight, not as firm as they’d once been, but beautiful still. So many years of late-night calls from hotel bedrooms, and somehow in the process she’d detached herself. He didn’t blame her. He closed his eyes and for a moment almost drifted off himself, but then the remembered thud of a body hitting the ground jolted him awake. To shut the sound out, he focused on her breasts and was rewarded by a stir of lust. Sometimes when you’re so saturated in death that you can’t soak up any more, only sex helps.
‘Were you anywhere near?’
‘Yes. I got quite close, then we were told to get back.’ He was afraid she might be drifting off to sleep. ‘Nerys? I’ve been thinking.’
‘Yes?’
Something in her voice, patient, school-mistressy, exasperated, deflated him. He was trying to remember how it had been when they were first married, how one night while he was painting a door in their first home she’d come up and put her arms around him from behind, rubbing his cock against the palm of her hand while her breath exploded between his shoulder blades in sharp hot bursts. ‘I can’t wait till bedtime,’ she’d said. ‘Come to bed now.’ And how once in grey, early-morning light, randy, waiting impatiently for her to wake, He’d slipped inside her, guilty, forcing himself not to move, but then miraculously she’d arched her back and giggled and let him in more deeply, and He’d realized she was only pretending to be asleep. They’d been so passionate then, insatiable. He’d wake up in the mornings, feeling the imprints of her hands all over his body, already hard and wanting her, even before he was fully conscious. ‘Perhaps we could go back to Suffolk sometime?’ Their first weekend together had been spent in Suffolk, on the coast at Shingle Street.
‘Did you ring me up to say that?’
‘I was just thinking.’ What He’d meant was not, ‘Can we go back to Suffolk?’ but ‘Can we go back?’
‘I expect it’s changed,’ she said. ‘Shingle Street. It’ll have been ruined by now.’
A sound in the background.
‘Are you in bed?’
‘Of course I’m in bed.’
‘I thought I heard somebody.’
‘Well, you didn’t.’
He had to believe her. But then he thought, There’s the man who does the garden, the man who does odd jobs around the house, the man who does repair work on the car, the man who helps her with the VAT – ‘I’m thinking of packing this in.’
‘What?’
‘This.’
‘Oh.’ She sounded disconcerted, though she’d been on at him to get a desk job in London for years. ‘You say that, but you don’t really mean it.’
‘Actually I think I do mean it – this time.’
‘How much have you had to drink?’
‘A few.’
‘Say it again when you’re sober and I’ll believe you.’
If this went on, they were going to quarrel. ‘OK. Anyway, I’m sorry I woke you up.’
And then, just as he was about to put the phone down, he heard a man’s voice, drowsy, bad-tempered, too fuddled with sleep to be cautious, say, ‘Who the fuck is it?’
Nerys said quickly, ‘I just switched on the World Service, darling. I think it might help me get back to sleep. Bye!’
The phone went dead. Stephen lay back against the pillows, thinking, Christ. Oh my God. And then, almost simultaneously, he thought, Yes. He’d known for a long time that something was going on. Nerys hadn’t been the same for, oh… months, years probably, only it had suited him to look the other way. His mind groped in darkness. One phone call, and everything changed. But then he thought, Nothing’s changed. They’d probably been sleeping together every night He’d been away. For years perhaps. The only thing that had changed was his awareness of the situation.
Resigned to a sleepless night, he got up, put on a scratchy, over-washed towelling robe and took himself and a bottle of whisky along the corridor to Ben’s room. Thick carpets, twice-breathed air. Only the puddle of grey footprints outside Ben’s door seemed real. He knocked, bracing himself for disappointment.
‘Come in.’
Ben was still dressed, watching television in the darkness, a bluish light from the screen reflected on to his face. He pressed Mute as Stephen came into the room, and turned on the lamp beside his chair. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair damp. Like Stephen, He’d showered off most of the dust. His cameras were on a table by the window. ‘I can’t stop watching it.’
‘No, nor me. Ridiculous, isn’t it? When it’s out there.’ He sat down. ‘Are you going back out?’
‘Yes, in a few minutes. I just had to get the dust off.’
Stephen offered the whisky. Ben fetched glasses from the bathroom and held them as Stephen poured. They clinked silently, then turned again to face the screen.
Ben said, ‘Do you think the world just changed?’
‘I think America will.’
‘I think things have changed. I mean real change. That was designed to be a photo-opportunity, and what have I done? I’ve spent the whole bloody day photographing it. Along with everybody else. Because we can’t escape from the need for a visual record. The appetite for spectacle. And they’ve used that against us, just as they’ve used our own technology against us.’
‘So what are you saying? We shouldn’t cover it?’
‘I don’t know what I’m saying. But I know something happened here – and it isn’t just that the Americans found out that they’re vulnerable too.’
Stephen took a gulp of whisky. ‘I just rang Nerys.’
‘Oh, good. I haven’t managed to get Kate.’
‘She was in bed with another man.’
A pause. At last he looked away from the screen. ‘Oh, my God, Stephen, I am sorry.’
‘It’s nothing. You compare it with what’s happened to a lot of people today… Going to work this morning…’
‘Have another drink.’
He didn’t want another drink. What he wanted was to be outside his own skin, but there was no way of arranging that. He pressed his fingers deep into his flesh, round the jaw, under the cheekbones, into the sockets of his eyes, reminding himself of how it all fitted together. ‘No, I won’t, thanks. I’m going to take a couple of sleeping pills and blot it all out.’
Getting up to go, he saw the cameras on the table. ‘Did you get any good shots?’
Couldn’t remember what the answer had been, but knew it now anyway. Yes, he got some very good shots. He always did, right to the end, right up to the last shot that killed him. He missed Ben. More than he missed Nerys. Now that was a shock, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been. He’d shared more with Ben.
It snowed hard all day. By evening the ground was completely covered. After a bad start, Stephen worked till four o’clock and only then allowed himself to think about Justine. He felt she would come, though he almost managed to hope that she wouldn’t, but when, unnaturally alert, he heard the crunch of her feet, he had got to the door and opened it before she knocked.
‘Adam couldn’t come,’ she said, stamping her boots on the mat. ‘He’s got a temperature.’
Perhaps it was true. ‘Wouldn’t you rather wait till he’s better?’
She stared at him. ‘No, if he’s going to be off school, I need something to keep him busy.’
‘Then we might as well go straight away. There’s no point in getting warm just to get cold again.’ He put on his coat. ‘How’s the car?’
‘Fixed. Beth got the AA out. Well, it’s almost as big a disaster for her as it is for me. If I can’t get to work, she can’t go to work.’
He opened the back door. There, improbably large and veined, was the full moon, a cratered desolation hanging in space. The snow was unmarked except for the imprint of birds’ feet around the bird table. It levelled everything: even the garden pond was level with the lawn, its fringe of dead reeds casting blue shadows on the snow.
‘I’ll go first, shall I?’
Cautiously, he felt his way down the path, each step scuffing up a fringe of snow. Once he turned and looked back. Snow-light was reflected palely up into her face. She was looking down, choosing where to put her feet. The hawthorn hedge that divided the garden from the path was thick with snow. Brushing against it in his struggle to open the gate, he dislodged dollops of snow that landed on his head and shoulders. His breath was everywhere.
Side by side now, they set off across the field. It would have helped to talk, but he couldn’t think of anything to say, and anyway needed his breath for the climb. He didn’t want to be too obviously gasping for breath. The moon filled the sky, casting their shadows long and black against the snow. Once they were in the copse, he stopped and listened, but, apart from the creaking of the branches, there was no sound. ‘Up there,’ he said.
They found the tree, and groped about in the snow between its roots to find the pellets. She stuffed about a dozen into her pocket. ‘That’ll do.’
It was harder going down. Once she tripped and he put a hand out to steady her, but she moved away again as soon as she recovered her balance. They came out from between the trees and stopped for a moment, gazing down over the white fields. Suddenly she caught his arm. ‘Look,’ she said.
A barn owl, perhaps even the owl that owned this nest, was hunting, quartering the frozen fields, relentless in its precision. Nothing that lived and moved could hope to escape its beak and feathered claws. He pictured it eating, the obscene delicacy of the raised claw feeding a recalcitrant tail into its beak, huge golden eyes slowly blinking. Backwards and forwards, up and down. It was an illusion, probably, that he could feel the ripple of disturbed air across his face. At last it detected movement and stooped to the kill, scattering snow, huge wings flapping and beating the air as it struggled to lift off, something small and warm wriggling in its claws.
‘Isn’t it odd?’ Justine said. ‘You always feel lucky when you see something like that, and yet it’s bloody horrible, really.’
As they started to walk down the hill, he said, ‘Would you like a drink before you go? You must be frozen.’
‘In the cottage?’
‘Yes. Or we can go out. Whatever.’
She considered, the roundness of her cheek in the pale light making her seem momentarily no older than Adam. ‘In would be fine,’ she said, and smiled.
She surprised him. He’d been prepared for anything, even virginity. Instead there was a swift, almost soundless orgasm, followed by sharp fingernails clutching his buttocks and urging him on. And it took him a long time. The last thing he’d expected, after several weeks of celibacy, was to be left standing on the starting blocks with his running shorts around his ankles. Evidently she felt extra help was required, because at the last moment she shoved her forefinger hard into his anus. When he was at last able to speak, he said, ‘Bloody hell, woman.’
She looked up at him like an affronted kitten. ‘Some people like that.’
People? She was the vicar’s daughter, for Christ’s sake. They lay, side by side, watching snowflakes fumble at the pane. The room was full of moonlight reflected off the snow. She’d asked him not to turn the lamps on, and at the time he’d thought he understood her shyness. Now he wasn’t so sure. After a while, he started to laugh, deep convulsive laughs that banged the headboard against the wall.
‘What?’ she asked. ‘What?’
‘That was wonderful.’
Snow had been falling steadily for the last hour, muffling every sound other than that of their own breathing. He saw how the moonlight caught the whites of her eyes. Anchoring himself in the present, he concentrated on the briny smell of her on his fingertips, closing his eyes.
Abruptly, in a single powerful movement, she launched herself off the bed, pulled on her T-shirt and raced downstairs.
Following her, a few minutes later, feeling sticky, drained, spindle-shanked and middle aged, he found her in the kitchen, frying bacon and eggs.
‘I’m famished,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you?’
Eleven
During the first few weeks of their working together Peter seemed simply bored. He
turned up on time, fetched, carried, lifted, mixed plaster, held buckets, cut cloth and, when not required, retreated to the corner of the room, between the plaster figures, so that often Kate would forget he was there, and then be startled when something moved on the periphery of her vision.
That changed when the figure began to take shape. She was familiar with this process: the sense, growing stronger by the hour, as she built up, carved, cut back, built up, carved again, of another presence in the room. The decisive moment came when it – he – acquired a face. With some amusement she noticed how Peter’s posture changed. Before, he’d stood easily with his back to the armature. Now he opened his shoulders when he was talking to her, as people do who feel the need to include another person in the group.
He noticed her observing this, and said, with a little self-conscious laugh, ‘I keep feeling I ought to speak to him. It seems rude to ignore him.’
He’d become fascinated by the process, or by the figure perhaps, by what it represented. Either way he was no longer the impersonal, passive assistant. Now, every day, he brought his brain as well as his muscles to the task, and that didn’t make it easy to maintain the clarity of her own conception. She was always aware of his mind pushing against hers, in the silence.
It’s in the nature of plaster that you have to work fast. It forces decisiveness on you, and yet there were many times now when she had to wait to be helped. Between the decision and the action, there was this hiatus, while she waited for him to mix the plaster, or hand the chisel up to her. Once, worn out and in great pain, she had to let him apply the plaster, and that was a small death. She watched his hands stroke it on, and told herself it didn’t matter who applied the plaster as long as she, and she alone, did the carving.
Only it did matter. Her grasp on the figure had become tentative – ‘fluid’, if you wanted to sound positive about the situation, but then ‘fluid’ wasn’t the way she worked. Normally she had the conception clear in her head from the beginning, so that the process of carving seemed almost like the uncovering of a figure already there, waiting to be released. Peter had destroyed that. Sometimes she looked down from the scaffold and saw him standing below, and his fingers would begin to twitch and she knew he was imagining the chisel in his own hands.