by Pat Barker
Beth’s voice came drifting out to him. ‘In here.’
She was in the conservatory. None of the windows was open, and he felt the clammy heat slick his face with sweat before he reached her. She was standing in front of a long table filling pots with compost. There were blue hyacinths blooming in a bowl beside her, spiralling up towards the light. Her fingers were covered with soil. She wiped the sweat away from her upper lip with one freckled forearm and smiled at him.
‘Hello,’ he said, and stood waiting. When nothing, apart from the returned greeting, was forthcoming, he said, ‘What a marvellous colour.’
‘Yes, isn’t it? I like them so much better than the pink ones.’
He waited. She seemed to be finding this difficult.
‘Robert and I were wondering if you’d do something for us?’
‘Of course. Anything I can.’
‘It’s just that, you know we’ve been planning this little trip to Paris? It’s not long, just the three nights, but I’m a bit worried about leaving Justine here on her own. We’ve had a few silent calls, and… well, they’re always a little bit disturbing, aren’t they? You always think it might be burglars checking to see if you’re in…’
Or one of Robert’s girlfriends trying to reach Robert.
‘I mean, I know she’s nineteen and plenty of girls that age have their own children…’
‘Not ten-year-olds.’
‘No, that’s true. Anyway, we were wondering if you’d step into the breach, as it were.’
‘You mean live in?’ He was enjoying this.
‘Yes, I think it would have to be in. There are plenty of beds.’
‘And Justine would be…?’
‘She’d be here too. And of course she’d take care of Adam during the day, so you wouldn’t have to stop work. Only we’d be happier if you were here at night.’
‘Sounds all right to me. When?’
‘Next weekend. We thought Friday till Monday.’
‘Yes, fine. What brought this on?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She was about to say something bland about the long winter, working too hard… ‘Things aren’t good,’ she seemed to surprise herself by saying.
‘Between you and Robert?’
An embarrassed nod, but then immediately she began to back off. A lot of it was just tiredness, Robert working all hours, she was doing a full-time job… ‘And this is a big place.’ She gazed round her with a hopeless expression, though the house was beautifully kept.
‘You’re obviously happy doing what you’re doing now. The garden…’
‘Yes, but –’
‘I suppose it’s a big place to run on one income.’
‘No, we could afford it, all right. The truth is I think if I were “just a housewife”…’ She was sketching inverted commas in the air as she spoke, but she meant it. ‘…Robert would get bored with me. Correction. Even more bored. You know he’s seeing somebody?’
Everybody, according to Justine. ‘No?’
‘I just wondered if he’d talked to you.’
She didn’t know, she was just guessing. ‘No, and I wouldn’t want him to.’ He hesitated, wishing he hadn’t started this conversation. ‘He won’t leave you.’
‘You mean he won’t leave Adam.’
That was exactly what he’d meant, but he could see she mightn’t find it encouraging. ‘Marriages go through all sorts of phases, Beth. The fact is you chose each other. And that says something about you which is probably still true.’
Stephen was feeling uncomfortable. His only qualification for advising on marriage was having made a mess of his own.
‘You know what I’d really like?’ she said, suddenly brightening. ‘A greenhouse. A big one, the kind they have in nurseries, not one of those fiddly little things. That’s what I really like – plants.’
‘Then go for it. You’re lucky to have a passion like that – most people don’t. And it’d fit in better with Adam.’
‘Oh, Adam’s all right.’
As if summoned, like the devil, by the mention of his name, Adam appeared in the doorway. Stephen turned to him. ‘You know what, Adam, I think it’s time we went and saw Archie again.’ One of the most successful days he and Justine and Adam had spent together had been at the Bird of Prey Centre. ‘If we’re very nice to Phil, he might let you fly him this time.’
Adam was beaming.
‘Who’s Archie?’ asked Beth.
‘An eagle owl,’ Adam said. ‘He’s huge, isn’t he, Stephen? Bigger than an eagle.’
‘And he’s in love with Phil, isn’t he?’
Adam giggled. ‘He keeps trying to mate with his glove. When can we go?’
‘Next weekend, when Mum and Dad are in Paris.’
‘Right,’ Adam said, and marched up the stairs, not looking back.
Stephen turned and found Beth looking at him with a rather wry expression. She said, ‘It’s very easy, you know, being an uncle.’
‘Oh, I’m sure. Uncles aren’t responsible for how they turn out.’
Twenty-three
And so, that Thursday, after driving Robert and Beth to the airport, Stephen moved some of his things up to the farmhouse and started playing house with Justine. That’s what it felt like – a holiday from adult life. The mere fact that the house was not his gave him an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling. He seemed to be wandering around between the chair legs while items of furniture loomed above him, mysterious with withheld significance. They made him feel insubstantial, these rooms with their carefully selected antiques, the fruits of years of settled, successful endeavour, and yet the feeling was not entirely unpleasant. Like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears, he had a sense of danger and transgression. He and Justine cooked meals for themselves and Adam, and sat down at the long table in the kitchen to eat them, and there was always this feeling of innocence and danger combined.
It was a happy time. He felt as irresponsible and carefree as Adam, or rather as Adam would have felt if he’d been a different sort of child. But even Adam seemed to feel liberated. He flew Archie, and Stephen took photographs of the moment when the eagle owl landed on his glove. Adam’s face was screwed up in fear, braced to take the weight, then amazed, as the great wings settled and folded and the golden eyes turned on him, that the bird was so light.
Stephen had the photos developed in Sainsbury’s, bought frames and hung them on the wall of Adam’s room.
They lived an old-fashioned circa 1950s family life, playing Monopoly in the evenings, going for walks in the forest, feeding the deer, running Adam to the point of exhaustion on the sands. His ambition, he told Stephen, was to have a dog.
‘Well, why not?’ Stephen said.
‘Because there’s nobody here in the day. It’d be cruel.’
‘What’s cruel,’ Stephen said, as he and Justine sat by the fire that evening, after Adam had gone to bed, ‘is the entire situation. I mean, if Beth was desperate to be a hospital administrator, fine, but she isn’t. She’d far rather be at home with the garden. That’s what she really wants to do, and if she did that, Adam could have his dog.’
‘Yes,’ Justine said. ‘But there’s no status in it.’
‘There is. I’d respect her for it.’
‘Robert’s friends wouldn’t. Or anyway she thinks they wouldn’t.’
‘It shouldn’t matter what they think.’
‘But it does. She’s terrified of being a stay-at-home mum, that’s all.’
‘So what’s your solution?’
‘Don’t have kids.’
‘It’s a bit late for that – he’s ten. Seriously.’
She shrugged. ‘If I ever had one, I’d like to think I could stay at home and take care of it myself and not feel I was making some kind of inferior choice. It’s quite old-fashioned, that idea that all your status comes from work.’
Oh, the joys of being nineteen. Everything’s so easy.
‘It’s about sex, though, isn’t it? She thinks if s
he’s not out there, she’ll lose him.’
‘She’s lost him anyway. Sexually.’
Stephen wanted to press her for more information – he felt she knew more than she was saying – but he didn’t think he should. Her outburst in the kitchen after Sunday lunch had been driven by her own unhappiness and he knew she regretted it. He wondered how she knew, but then remembered she had a friend in the medical school where Robert taught. It might be no more than student gossip. The private lives of lecturers never lose anything in the telling. But he couldn’t ask. ‘Come on,’ he said, standing up. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
Bed had become the place they went to sleep. Partly he felt inhibited having sex in his brother’s house – almost as if Robert had taken on the role of parent – but also, his relationship with Justine was changing in ways he didn’t understand. Whatever the reason, during that long weekend, there was no attempt at love-making until the final night.
Beth had just rung to confirm that she and Robert would be back home late the following morning. She sounded eager to be back, though whether that meant the break had been a failure or a brilliant success wasn’t clear. Justine put down the phone and said, ‘That’s it, then.’
He felt both relieved and sad. The smell of logs burning in the grate brought an autumnal melancholy into the spring evening. They went on talking for a while, but they were both tired. She started getting ready for bed. He stood on the steps for a minute before locking the door, looking up at the clear, brilliant stars, and then, awed and dismayed, scuttled back inside, turned the keys and rattled the chain into place.
She was waiting for him in the bedroom, beside the big double bed, reflected in the mirror on the wall behind her. ‘Better close the curtains,’ he said, though there was nobody to see except the owls, who seemed to hoot less on these spring nights, that, or the leaves muffled the sound. She went to the window and leant out. He followed, put his arms around her from behind, cradling her breasts in his hands, burying his face in the sweet-smelling hair at the nape of her neck.
A sound made him look up. He stood listening for any sound of movement from Adam’s room. This is what it’s like to be a parent, he thought. It amazed him there weren’t more only children in the world. He couldn’t rest until he’d put on his dressing-gown and looked in on Adam, who was curled up under the covers, only the top of his head visible. ‘Fast asleep,’ he said, coming back into the bedroom, but the mood had been broken. Justine closed the curtains and got into bed. He slipped off the dressing-gown and lay beside her.
Moonlight made a pale oblong on the polished wood floor. Under the door was a line of yellow from Adam’s night light. Somewhere on the roof a bird’s feet scratched. Stephen was taking quick, shallow breaths as much from oppression as desire. He put his hand on her firm flat stomach, marvelling at the solidity of her, the warmth. All around them the house sighed and creaked. In the room next door moonlight flooded through the open curtains on to the white-lace counterpane of Robert and Beth’s bed, the hollows in the pillows where their heads had rested still visible though they were far away. He was thinking about Nerys, a vague memory of their early marriage when they’d been in love, happy and innocent, though perhaps they’d never been that. It was hard to remember now.
‘What’s the matter?’ Justine asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘You want this to end, don’t you?’
‘I’ll be glad when they’re back.’
‘No, I meant this. Us.’
‘No, that’s not true. I suppose I want to stop being in limbo. I want something to happen.’
‘What?’ A cool, almost hostile tone. She was looking deep into the pupil of one eye, the lover’s gaze, but there was nothing intimate in her expression. She looked like an entomologist who’s just found the wrong number of spots on an insect’s backside.
‘I don’t know. Anyway, it’s too soon to think about it. I haven’t finished the book yet.’
He didn’t want to talk about this or to talk at all. He reached up and touched the side of her face, then pulled her head down towards him. Her nipples brushed his chest, and –
Adam stood in the door. ‘I want a drink of water.’
Justine lay back, trying not to laugh. ‘Go and get one, then. I’ll come and see you when you’re in bed.’
She was gone five minutes. When she returned, Stephen said, ‘Is he asleep?’
‘Is he hell.’
After a while she closed her eyes. He continued to lie as before, listening to her breathing until he was sure from its depth and steadiness that she must be asleep. He lay, tumescent and sleepless, feeling a stab of nostalgia for the cottage, which he missed, though it was only 200 yards away.
He’d just managed to erase the last sexual fantasy from his brain and was settling down to sleep, when, with an enormous whale-like heave of the bedclothes, Justine changed position and, still sleeping, thrust her cool, lordotic arse into his groin.
Oh, Justine. Justine. He turned, cautiously, the other way, thrusting his aching pole into space. Only after an uncomfortable hour spent clinging to the edge of the mattress, fantasies of riotous, Adam-free sex seething and bubbling in his brain, did he finally manage to get off to sleep.
Twenty-four
Monday morning. In six hours Robert and Beth would be back home. Waking, Stephen threw his arm across the empty space and was ambushed by a sense of loss. He thought about Kate waking every morning without Ben beside her. There was no possible comparison, of course, between his momentary missing of Justine’s warmth and Kate’s loss. He was startled that he’d even made the comparison.
Justine was in the kitchen, fully dressed, frying bacon. Adam, in school uniform, sat slumped at the table, white-faced, bent over, complaining of tummy ache. Justine put a bacon sandwich, normally his favourite food, in front of him.
‘I’m a vegetarian,’ he said, pushing it away.
‘Since when?’ Justine demanded.
‘Since now.’
‘Why now?’
‘Why not now?’
‘C’mon, Adam, eat up,’ Stephen said.
Adam was clutching his stomach. ‘I’ve got tummy ache.’
‘He does look very white,’ Stephen said.
‘He’s like this every Monday.’
Stephen sat down beside him. ‘Adam, why don’t you want to go to school?’
A shrug.
‘There must be a reason.’
‘Everybody thinks I’m weird.’
‘Now why do you think they think that?’
‘Because I am weird.’
Stephen was left wondering whether insight was really such a good thing. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to eat?’
An exaggerated wet-dog shake of the head.
Justine cleared his plate away without comment. ‘Mum and Dad’ll be here when you get back, think of that.’
Adam trailed after her to the car and climbed – slow-motion – into the back seat.
‘Fasten your seat belt, Adam,’ Justine said.
‘I can’t. It hurts my tummy.’
‘The car won’t start till you fasten the belt.’
A bit of an empty threat, that, Stephen thought, since Adam didn’t want the car to start.
‘Adam,’ he said, bending into the car. ‘If you go to school without making a fuss I’ll take you to fly Archie this Friday after school. How’s that?’
Justine mouthed at him over the roof of the car. ‘I can’t believe you did that.’
‘What?’
‘Bribed him.’
‘Promise?’ Adam called from the back seat.
‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ He caught Justine’s eye as she got into the driver’s seat. ‘I’m allowed to be irresponsible. I’m only an uncle.’
She smiled. ‘Are you staying here?’
‘No, I thought I’d go back to the cottage and get some work done. What about you?’
‘I’ve got some shopping to do for Beth.’
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‘Right, then, see you later.’
It was a matter-of-fact leave-taking, he thought, as he went back into the farmhouse. They might have been married for years.
Quickly, he tidied up the spare bedroom, put the sheets into the laundry basket, did a quick check to make sure he hadn’t left any personal belongings behind and then let himself out of the farmhouse and walked quickly down the lane to the cottage. Inside, it smelled cold and musty, even after an absence of only three nights. He lit the fire, switched on the computer and tried to work.
On Friday he’d broken off in the middle of a discussion about the bombardment of Baghdad in 1991 – the first war to appear on TV screens as a kind of son et lumière display, the first where the bombardment of enemy forces acquired the bloodless precision of a video game. He’d found it disconcerting at the time, and still did. What happens to public opinion in democracies – traditionally reluctant to wage war – when the human cost of battle is invisible? Of course there was nothing new in strict wartime censorship: it had been imposed in both world wars. But, in the first, nothing could hide the arrival of the telegrams nor, in the second, the explosion of bombs. What had been new about Baghdad and later Belgrade was the combination of censorship with massive, one-sided aerial bombardment so that allied casualties were minimal or non-existent and ‘collateral damage’ couldn’t be shown. These were wars designed to ensure that fear and pain never came home.
But he was finding it difficult to get started. Walk. Walk first. A walk would freshen him up. He decided to take his usual route to the top of the hill, though it was a long walk, longer than he really had time for. At first he tried to jog, the grass he ran through flashing fire as his trainers shook off drops of dew. The sky a clear, translucent blue, and far away on the horizon a plane with the sunlight glinting on its wings had left twin vapour trails behind it, spreading out, thinning, fading to nothingness, though, whether from distance or some trick of the landscape, no sound reached him.