by Pat Barker
They stood together on the wet pavement. Stephen put a hand on Ian’s shoulder. ‘Well, good night.’
‘You stay in touch now.’
‘Next time I’m in London – I’ll give you a ring.’
Ian set off to his hotel. After a few yards, he turned and, walking backwards, called, ‘You couldn’t have saved him. He’d have gone whatever you said.’
Stephen raised his hand. ‘’Night, Ian.’
He walked slowly upstairs to the first floor, struggled to turn the key in the lock and then flopped down on the bed. He closed his eyes and saw the photograph of the young man exhumed from a mass grave in Kosovo. He’d been there when that was taken, pressing a handkerchief over his nose. Summer. Dusty trees. Chequered light and shade. They followed the smell up the valley, plagued by flies that zigzagged above the narrow path between the trees. Drunk on sweat and the smell of decay, one kept settling on his upper lip. Flies settled on the blindfolded man too, but he didn’t try to brush them away. Stephen watched a fly zoom into the gaping hole of his mouth.
You couldn’t have saved him.
Jerking awake, he realized the bedside lamp was still on, thought about getting up, undressing, pouring a glass of water, but couldn’t in the end be bothered to do any of those things.
Instead, he groped for the switch and turned off the light.
Over breakfast he read the article he’d written the day before. At the last moment Ted had rung to say they’d got a terrific photograph of Milosevic entering the tribunal, so could the story start with that? Reluctantly, he’d rewritten the first paragraph – with difficulty, since, like most people, he hadn’t seen Milosevic come in.
The photo – it had pride of place at the head of the page – showed the chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, laughing in triumph as the ex-dictator, a shadowy figure with bowed shoulders, was escorted to his seat.
Ted was right, it was a terrific photograph. A dramatic moment. Unfortunately, it had never happened. He’d been watching Carla del Ponte, her helmet of blonde hair gleaming under the lights, sharing a joke with the other prosecuting attorneys, wholly absorbed in that conversation. Not only had she not laughed in triumph at Milosevic’s downfall – she hadn’t even noticed him.
So much for photography as the guarantor of reality. It pissed him off. He kept telling himself it didn’t matter, but all the time he knew it did. Image before words every single time. And yet the images never explain anything and often, even unintentionally, mislead.
*
That afternoon, he played truant from the tribunal and went to the Mauritshuis, where he spent a long time in front of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Enormous eyes, blackness all around her, a dazzle of pain and tears. She reminded him a little of Justine, and the time he spent with her did more than anything else to rinse his mind clean.
Fourteen
Back home, rattling his key in the lock – the front door was hard to open because the wood swelled in damp weather – he braced himself to face the dark and chilly cottage, no fire, no food in the fridge, and the manuscript, lying in wait for him on the table, which even after this short break seemed about as appetizing as a bowl of cold porridge.
Instead he opened the living-room door and saw a fire blazing in the grate and smelled food cooking. The whole room had been tidied up and cleaned. All he had to do was sit down by the fire, pour a glass of whisky, and wait for Justine to get back from the farmhouse.
And upstairs – he knew without going to look – there would be clean sheets and pillowcases and a vase with flowers on the table by the bed.
That first time had set the pattern for all their subsequent encounters. If it made sense to speak of practical orgasms, then that is what Justine had, and always they were followed by this sudden sharpening of her appetite. Sex never made Justine fancy grilled fish and steamed spinach, seasoned with lemon juice and freshly grated nutmeg. Oh, no, Justine’s taste was death-on-a-plate fry-ups, washed down by plenty of booze.
‘If you’re going to be a doctor, you’ll have to change the way you eat,’ he said sourly from the kitchen door. ‘And drink less.’
She looked up, flashing her sudden broad smile. ‘Ah, but I’m going to be a medical student first.’
He found the sex extraordinary, like nothing he’d ever experienced. Foreplay? he wanted to croak as Justine got her leg over for the second time that night. Or, What happened to romance? OK, he found the idea of quick, impersonal sex as exciting as the next man, but he didn’t want it in his own bedroom night after night with somebody he knew. Something had happened to Justine to make her both sexually uninhibited – there was nothing they didn’t do – and emotionally withdrawn. She still wouldn’t let him switch on the lamp, or even light a candle, so on cloudy nights they made love in pitch darkness. It began after a while to have an almost mythical quality, this prohibition against seeing her face, and it was her face that she was hiding. She joined him in the shower afterwards with no trace of embarrassment.
Sometimes, as on the first night, she spoke airily about ‘people’. People liked this, people didn’t like that, though he guessed, from various clues she let slip, that she’d had only one previous lover. Increasingly he was aware of this unknown man as an invisible third in their love-making, a secret sharer, his presence falling like a shadow on her skin.
Once or twice she talked about it, the affair she’d had last summer after A-levels, how shocked she’d been when the young man dumped her. No warning. She’d thought everything was all right, and then one evening he’d said, ‘I don’t think this is working.’ Her eyes filled with tears as she said it, and she rubbed her wet cheek on his shoulder. ‘Why do you think he thought that?’ Stephen asked. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think he ever meant it to be permanent. It was just for the summer.’
She gave no further details, but she returned to the subject again and again, and always, whenever she mentioned it, her eyes filled with tears.
There’s an old saying that a man is only as old as the woman he feels, but Justine made him feel ancient. He wanted to say, ‘Look, this time next year you’ll be in love with somebody else. You won’t be able to remember what you saw in him.’ And when you’re my age, he thought sadly, you won’t even remember who he was. He didn’t say any of that. Instead he watched her face, blind and groping through pain, and thought that all this so-called wisdom was useless, because it couldn’t be conveyed without sounding patronizing. And perhaps he was being patronizing. No, patronizing wasn’t the right word, he cared too much about her for that. Paternal, that was more like it.
They went to bed and made love, and for once he saw her, or part of her, the shadows of clouds dissolving and re-forming over her breasts. He groaned and clutched her hips, grinding her pelvis into his, throwing his head back and baring his teeth as he came.
Nope, paternal wasn’t the right word either.
*
After ten days of intensely hard work, bending over the computer until his eyes burned, Stephen began to find the cottage unbearably claustrophobic. The fact was that Justine had insinuated herself into his living space. Not his work space, but almost everywhere else. She rearranged objects, tidied up, washed up, vacuumed the carpets. He never protested, except once when he found her ironing his shirts and told her roughly to stop being a doormat.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, flushing. ‘Dad’s pretty helpless, and –’
‘I’m not.’
It might have been better if they’d gone out more, but she didn’t want to go out. If he suggested a meal in a restaurant, or a drink, she always referred to some parishioner of her father’s who was sure to be there. ‘So what?’ he felt like saying. She was single; he was, if not single, at least separated from his wife. It was nobody else’s business.
When he finally stopped work in the evening, they watched television, like an old married couple. It was strange watching news bulletins, or programmes like Panorama that in the past
he’d often contributed to, but he soon found that Justine disliked them anyway.
‘Why won’t you watch the news?’ he asked. It staggered him, this indifference to what was going on in the world.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t see the point. There’s nothing I can do about it. If it’s something like a famine, OK, you can contribute, but with a lot of this there’s nothing anybody can do except gawp and say, “Ooh, isn’t it awful?” when really they don’t give a damn. It’s all pumped-up emotion, it’s just false, like when those families come on TV because somebody’s gone missing, or thousands of people send flowers to people they don’t know. It’s just wanking.’
That last word was the give-away. ‘But you can’t have a democracy if people don’t know what’s going on.’
‘You can read the papers. It’s the voyeurism of looking at it, that’s what’s wrong. Do you know, some people never watch the news, on principle?’
‘I don’t know how people tell the difference between principle and just being too fucking self-centred to care.’
The long hours alone with Justine, in bed and out of it, had the unexpected effect of waking him up sexually. Like Cleopatra, but rather earlier in life, she made hungry where most she satisfied. Now, as he walked through the streets of Newcastle on his way back from the university library to his car, he noticed every woman he passed. The sensation was almost painful, like blood flowing back into a numbed limb.
The sky was a deep turquoise, and the starlings were beginning to gather, huge folds and swathes of them coiling, spiralling, circling, and everywhere their clicks and chatterings, as insistent as cicadas. Beneath this frenzy, another frenzy of people rushing home from work, shopping; young people setting off for a night out; girls, half naked, standing in shop doorways; young men in short sleeves, muscular arms wreathed in blue, green, red and purple, dragons and serpents coiled round veined biceps. He passed a gaggle of girls, the pink felt penises on top of their heads bobbing about in the wind that blew up from the Quayside. Perhaps he gaped too obviously, for one of them turned round and stuck two fingers in the air.
He walked through all this, muffled up against the weather, sensible, middle aged and cautious, but also, as the blue light deepened and the girls became lovelier, racked with lust. He stopped at the foot of Grey’s Monument, craning to look up, while thousands of starlings broke in waves above his head and a few stars pricked through the darkening sky.
Standing here like this, in his dark mac among the half-naked boys and girls, he looked, he suspected, not merely middle aged but furtive. The man in the park peering up the skirts of little girls on the swings. He needed a drink, and that was a problem because he had the car with him. And yet he didn’t want to go tamely back home with a bottle as he had on previous nights. Not bloody likely. He looked around for a wine bar – he could have one drink, for God’s sake, there was no harm in that, and even one at the moment felt like a life-saver, softening his mood, dissolving the hard edges of memory so that he could flow into the lives around him.
And then he saw Peter Wingrave, standing in the doorway of Waterstone’s, obviously waiting for somebody, a girl, probably. Or perhaps not. He watched Peter watching the crowds and saw an echo of his own loneliness, his own desperation. It was enough. Peter glanced up as soon as he realized he was being directly approached, with a face prepared for strangers, cautious, polite, ready to take evasive action, balanced on the balls of his feet. Excessively cautious, surely. Stephen could well believe it might get rough a bit later in the evening, but not now.
‘Hi,’ Stephen said.
A flash of recognition, succeeded almost immediately by a dull flush. Now why? Because he’s on the pick-up, on the prowl, or perhaps not even that. Perhaps just ashamed of being alone. He was very attractive-looking underneath the nerdy specs and the designer stubble, but you couldn’t see him fitting in easily with his contemporaries, though he knew nothing about him, really. He had no grounds for thinking that. Peter might be the linchpin of a thriving social network, for all he knew. Good looks, intelligence, charm… And something else, something that undermined them all.
‘Mr Sharkey.’
‘Stephen.’ Despite Peter’s confident use of the name, he seemed uncertain. ‘We met at Kate’s studio.’
‘Yes.’ He was glancing from side to side, as if looking for a way out of the encounter. But when Stephen suggested a drink, his gaze immediately focused on Stephen’s face and after only a second’s hesitation he said, ‘Yes.’
They went to a wine bar a few hundred yards down the street. It was crowded, but not with the kind of young people who were walking past outside. This was job-related drinking, people disguising from each other the fact that they had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, clinging to this extended version of the working day because outside it they didn’t exist.
Or because they love their jobs, he reminded himself, remembering how much he’d loved his.
A man with a roll of pink fat overlapping his collar was speaking urgently into a mobile phone, a finger blocking out the din from his other ear. They had to push their way past him to get to the bar. Stephen was sweating, though outside he’d been cold in spite of the coat. Peter asked for a whisky. Stephen bought him a double, himself a single, and stood pinned against the bar, wondering why he was doing this. Glancing at Peter, Stephen saw him looking round, searching the faces round the bar, and, as he leant closer to speak to him, he caught a whiff of sweat, fresh, but not the normal scent of a healthy body reacting to heat. He’d always meant to ask somebody – Robert might know – why fear sweat smells different from ordinary sweat. It certainly did. An intimate acquaintance with his own armpits in various sticky situations had taught him that. And yet these people were, what? Accountants? Lawyers? Not the kind of people to tear strangers in their midst limb from limb. But at least he now knew why Peter interested him – had done from the moment he walked into the studio. Something was wrong, something didn’t fit, and Stephen’s nose for a story was twitching.
It was hard to get a conversation going. Partly the noise, partly his own state of mind. When he’d been working as hard as he had recently a kind of verbal dislocation set in, in which it was hardly possible to string another sentence together, and names of even very common everyday objects escaped him. He’d hear himself say ‘thingy’ or ‘whatsit’. It had irritated the hell out of Nerys, but then so had everything else he did, in the end.
‘Have you been working for Kate long?’
‘No, just a few weeks. It’s useful because gardening dries up in the winter months.’
‘Oh, yes, I remember. You’re a gardener.’
‘I’ve done a lot of gardening.’
‘But it’s not what you want to do?’
‘No, I want to be a writer.’
Oh, God. No wonder he’d been so keen on coming for a drink. He was on the lookout for contacts, agents, publishers. Stephen was already working out a cast-iron excuse for why he couldn’t read whatever it was Peter’d written.
It’s a haiku.
I really am pressed for time at the moment…
‘Have you had anything published?’ An unkind question, perhaps, but then he wasn’t trying to be kind.
‘A couple of stories in New Writing. I did an MA in creative writing.’ He winced fastidiously, forestalling Stephen’s reaction. ‘And the Writer in Residence sent them off to the editors and…’ He shrugged. ‘They accepted them.’
‘You don’t sound very pleased.’
‘To be honest, I wish I’d had the guts to say no.’
The bar had suddenly become less crowded as a group of people left together. Stephen waved Peter across to a table. It was a relief not to have to shout and, tucked away in a corner like this, Peter seemed to relax. ‘Why’s that?’ he asked, as they settled at a table. ‘I thought it was quite prestigious. A showcase.’
‘Yes, but unless you’re Damien Hirst, you don’t want to put a dead sheep in it.’
Stephen took this to be mock modesty, and it made him impatient. ‘C’mon, they can’t be that bad.’
‘You know that poem, I can’t remember the words, something about using the snaffle and the curb, but where’s the bloody horse?’ He looked charming, modest, vulnerable. Self-mocking. ‘They’re a bit like that. Equine deficiency syndrome?’
‘Do you think there’s a cure?’
‘Oh, no, I shouldn’t think so.’ His voice had gone flat, as if he’d stumbled into talking more seriously than he’d intended. ‘Terminal.’
‘I’d like to read them.’ As if to explain this unusual desire to himself, Stephen went on, ‘Too much control. It’s an unusual fault in a young writer.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is. If you give me your address, I’ll let you have them. If you really mean it?’
‘Of course I do,’ Stephen said, already regretting it. ‘How are you finding the job with Kate?’
‘Fascinating.’
‘Have you found out how it turns into bronze?’
‘More or less. I’m still not sure I understand it. Nothing you actually touch appears in the finished product, I know that much.’
‘Does she talk about what she’s doing?’
‘Not really – sometimes when we’re having coffee she’ll say something, but mainly it’s just, “Where’s the chisel?” “I need more plaster.”’ He was smiling, but his eyes were alert. Perhaps he’d detected more interest from Stephen than he could account for. ‘You knew her husband?’
‘Yes, we were in Bosnia together. And various other places. Round and about.’
‘Rwanda?’
‘For a while.’
‘Afghanistan?’
‘Briefly.’
‘I’ve seen some of his photographs.’
He didn’t say any of the things people normally say, and Stephen was grateful for that. It was the last thing he wanted to talk about. ‘Have you tried your hand at a novel yet?’