by Pat Barker
Slowly, people started to talk. ‘Sea fret,’ somebody said. ‘Have you noticed they’ve started calling it “the haar” on the telly?’ A rumble of contempt. Just what a cartload of southern poofs would call it. Apparently, sea-fret was a north-east coast speciality, and now it wasn’t actually threatening to kill them they were becoming fond of it again.
Once on dry land, the passengers dispersed rapidly, a group of people momentarily united by danger indifferent to each other again, strangers.
‘That was a bit too eventful for my liking,’ Stephen said, as they walked away from the boat.
‘What, after Bosnia? I don’t believe you.’
‘I’m afraid of drowning.’
It was true. From childhood he’d had a horror of inchoate depths, full of things that nibble off toes and eyelids. He could even remember what had sparked the fear: the wreck of a boat near Slaughden Quay in Aldeburgh, where they’d gone for their half-term holidays. In fine weather the boat’s greying wood was a familiar landmark, but, coming home from a walk one dark and stormy afternoon, he’d seen it in a different light, cold and slimy, with the river water rising remorselessly over its rotting timbers. Something about it terrified him, and he’d run all the way back to their rented cottage. How old would he have been? Seven, eight? Couldn’t have been more than that.
‘I could do with a drink,’ Justine said. ‘What about you?’
They found a hotel with a public bar and settled down with glasses of whisky over a log fire. They had the bar almost to themselves, except for a noisy crowd of golfers at the other end, who’d abandoned the attempt to play and were drinking determinedly instead. Apart from them, the hotel seemed to be empty. Stephen was glad of the noise because under cover of that boisterous and extroverted chatter he and Justine could talk casually, or not talk at all and just stare into the flames.
‘You know we needn’t go back,’ he said after a while. He had nothing on till Friday, when he was having lunch with Kate and taking Adam to the Bird of Prey Centre after school. ‘I could ask if they’ve got a room.’
‘All right. Yes,’ she said, downing the last of her whisky. ‘Good idea.’
They had a double room. He checked in, then went to get their stuff from the car. Not that they had much, except coats and spare sweaters. They went up to the room together, and while the landlady chattered on, Justine sat on the bed, testing it. It was a big, old-fashioned bed with head and foot boards, creaky springs and goose-down pillows piled high.
Their windows overlooked the harbour, where a dozen or more small boats rode at anchor, their rigging producing a constant clicking and thrumming. A disturbing noise. It was the sound he’d heard when he’d found the half-submerged boat, and perhaps that was why he associated it with fear. But he was anxious – as he had not been anxious on the first night they’d spent together. Justine sat on the window-seat, looking down on the boats. Stephen rested a hand on the nape of her neck and then, afraid the gesture might feel too proprietorial, stepped back and caught the tail end of a smile on her lips.
‘Do you feel hungry?’ he asked.
‘Not really. I think I’d like to go for a walk first.’
‘OK. It’s not raining?’
‘No, look at the water.’
Stephen moved away. Justine turned to look at him, her eyes that sullied, bewildered blue that moved him so deeply. They stared at each other, aware of the bed waiting for them, tempted. But he didn’t want to do that, he wanted there to be a long, slow careful approach. In a way, courtship, though it was an odd word to use when they’d been sleeping together for months.
They walked for miles along the beach, buffeted by the wind that blew the last vestiges of mist away. The waves roared up the sand, spread out in great arcs of foaming lace, then withdrew quietly, with a long slow dragging sigh. They played at being chased by the waves, and once, overconfident, he did get caught and splashed out with his trousers soaked to the knee. Like children, he thought, the pair of them, but with something that was not childlike there as a constant undertow, pulling them towards the moment of fulfilment in that bed. Sex was in every glance, every shout of laughter, but only once, struggling up the sand dunes to where they’d left the car, did they hold hands.
The bar was full of locals when they got back, and under cover of the noise they talked, leaning back into the high settle by the fire. The whisky winked and glinted in his glass, and the heat from the flames made his lips feel big and bloated, fish lips. Stop drinking, he told himself. Then suddenly the bar started to empty, and they were alone with each other and the fire.
Justine was feeling along her right cheekbone.
‘Is it still sore?’
‘Only when I press it.’ She forced a smile. ‘I think you’re very brave, going round with me at the moment. Everybody’s probably looking at you and thinking, what a bastard.’
‘Bloody stupid woman, keeps walking into doors.’
But it wasn’t funny. After a while she said, ‘It was a steep learning curve. When Dad was letting out our flat to the Fresh Start Initiative, quite a few of the people who stayed in it were battered wives who’d finally managed to get away, sometimes after years and years of abuse, and I used to look at them and think, You’re young, you’re healthy, you can earn your own living, why the bloody hell did you put up with that for years? But as soon as it happens to you, you realize how easy it is to be cowed. The shock. It’s almost like an animal, a mouse or something, playing dead.’
‘Playing dead isn’t a bad strategy if you’re not strong enough to fight back. Physically.’
‘I’m disgusted with myself.’
‘You shouldn’t be. You did the right things.’
‘I thought I was a fighter.’
‘You can’t fight two great big beefy blokes.’
‘But they weren’t. Big beefy blokes.’
‘They were stronger than you.’
What is it about her? he thought, as she continued to stare into the fire. Some quality in her that he didn’t think he’d ever encountered before, and was almost unable to name. The word that kept coming to mind was ‘gallant’, an old-fashioned word even applied to men, and it had never, even in its heyday, been applied to women. And yet that was the word, or as close as he could get. ‘Come on,’ he said, standing up. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
Kate had kept herself busy all afternoon with jobs around the house, but all the while the figure went on changing inside her head. She daren’t let herself think directly about it, and so ended up by splashing corrosive cleaning fluids around the inside of the oven with such abandon she was left with thin red burn lines above the rubber gloves.
Housework was much more reliably satisfying than art, she thought, wiping her hand across her forehead as she finished. Scrub these surfaces long and hard enough and you could scarcely avoid ending up with a clean kitchen. Break your neck on the risen Christ, and there’s no guarantee you’ll be left with anything except a broken neck.
Daren’t drink. Daren’t phone anybody. It would be disastrous to talk about it now and impossible not to. The answering machine clicked and whirred, but she shut the door on the voices.
Then, at the last possible moment, she went across to the studio, locking the house door carefully behind her as, only two days ago, she might not have bothered to do – and let herself into the studio.
Moonlight. A white floor. The white silent figure pinning down its own shadow. She stood in front of the plinth. The figure seemed different, though really it was her way of seeing it that had changed. Partly because of Peter. Because somebody else had seen it. The resemblance to a fish, or a pupa starting to hatch, was still there, but no longer dominated. He was a man now. All this time he’d been alone with the clouds and the moonlight and the shadows forming and dissolving on the floor, and in that time he’d become a thing apart. There was a life here now that no longer depended on her.
For a long time they stood and stared at each other. Well, there
you are. She framed the words silently in her mind, dropping each one into a deep well. Finished.
Then she bobbed her head and slipped out quickly into a night of stars and shadows.
The load fell from her shoulders as she walked across the yard and let herself into the house. Who could she tell? Nobody – it was too late to ring anybody now.
She went into the living room to find Ben, though it was not Ben, only a thing made of bronze.
Better, really, to remember him as he’d been that first weekend they spent together in Northumberland, when they went into Chillingham Church and found, around a corner, unexpectedly, Lord and Lady Grey lying together on their tomb, in a peace that five hundred years of turmoil had done nothing to disrupt. Unconsciously she felt for Ben’s amulet. Two couples, one flesh and blood, one alabaster. Now only one couple left. She pressed her lips to the cold bronze of Ben’s forehead and went slowly upstairs to bed.
Moonlight shining in through the uncurtained windows lit up the high white bed. The wind and tide were rising, scouring the little town as if it were a barnacle they were trying to scrape off a rock. Stephen opened the window and streams of cold air passed over his face and chest. The thrumming of rigging against the masts had become a frenzy.
‘I hope we’ll be able to sleep,’ he said.
‘Oh? I was rather hoping we wouldn’t.’
She’d come out of the bathroom, naked, and was standing beside the plump bed. He started pulling off his clothes. She pulled back the bedspread and slipped between the sheets, where she lay watching him, her pupils so dilated that her eyes looked black.
In a way that sometimes happens, once or twice in a lifetime perhaps, he knew he would remember this moment till the day he died. Naked, he went across to the bed and pulled back the covers.
She said, ‘Do you love me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I love you.’
He climbed in beside her and for a moment they said and did nothing, lying side by side, fingers intertwined. The moonlight found the whites of her eyes. For a moment he saw the girl in the stairwell in Sarajevo, but she’d lost her power. This moment in this bed banished her, not for ever, perhaps, but for long enough. He rolled over and took Justine in his arms.
Twenty-eight
It seemed a shame to wake her, so he slid out of bed in the grey dawn light, found the clothes he’d scattered over the floor last night in his haste to get them off and crept with them into the bathroom. He dressed, then tiptoed out of the room.
Downstairs there was a smell of bacon frying. The relentless hotel trade which dictates that the working day should end after midnight and start again before dawn. Mouth filling with saliva, he crossed the bar, which was full of the smells of cigarette smoke and stale beer. Even the red plush banquettes seemed to exhale a stale sat-upon smell, as if still warm from last night’s backsides.
He was afraid he might find the door locked and have to ask somebody to come from the kitchen to let him out, but no, it was open. He stepped out into the chilly dawn air and stood staring up and down the street. Deserted – until a trolley with chinking milk bottles came into sight further up the hill and stopped long enough for the girl driver, muffled up against the chill, to get down and deliver several bottles. He turned his collar up and set off in the opposite direction.
As he came out from between the houses, he saw the sea. He started to walk on the beach in deep fine, unpolluted sand, until he came to a row of ‘dragons’ teeth’: gigantic blocks of concrete scattered along the edge of the dunes in a rough line like a child’s bricks. Tank traps – the detritus of the last war. They were covered with graffiti: NFC RULES, SUNDERLAND ARE WANKERS. Ben would have loved them. They reminded Stephen a little of his last photograph: the abandoned Russian armoured cars in Afghanistan, filling almost the whole frame. No room for anything else except a strip of sky and that small, white, moribund sun.
A minute after he took that photograph he was dead.
Stephen had been travelling in a convoy behind him. They were flagged down, warned not to go any further. Ahead, in a gulley by the side of the road, was what looked like a heap of rugs. He’d known before he was told that it was Ben. Nobody could be sure that he was dead, only that he’d been seen lying in a bomb crater by the side of the road. Stephen had known with absolute certainty that he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t go to find out. Ben might be wounded or unconscious: it was just barely possible that he could be saved.
And so he ran, bent double – as if that would have made the slightest difference – to the armoured car. He told himself to go back, and went on running. He ran round the side of the vehicle, saw nothing, and then, at the bottom of the pocked and scarred hole, he saw him, lying on his back, his camera only a few feet away.
Stephen dislodged stones and pebbles as he scrambled down the slope, briefly hopeful because Ben looked untouched. But he didn’t stir. His open eyes stared into the white sun without wincing. There was an ants’ trail of blood coming down from the left temple. He looked surprised. Stephen expected to be shot himself at any moment – obviously a sniper had the road covered. His teeth were chattering. Oh, so they do that, he thought, calm enough, shocked enough, to be interested. He started to unfasten the chain from round Ben’s neck, but his hands were shaking too much, so he caught a loop of it between his fingers and wrenched it off. The catch had lasted longer than his luck. Then the camera. He must have come down here to take a photograph, lining up his camera for the shot, while somewhere out of sight another man lined up his gun. Nothing here but stones and rocks. But then Stephen looked up and saw them, the wrecked tanks. He’d been driven past them twenty times perhaps, but he hadn’t spotted what Ben saw. From the bottom of the crater they looked like a wave breaking. A sun so white it might have been the moon hung in the sky behind them. All the time, he was talking to Ben, saying, ‘You fucking idiot. You stupid, fucking fool. Your life – for that?’
Clutching the camera to his chest, he turned and ran back, his boots loud on the gritty road, expecting at any moment that final explosion of pain in head or chest, but he reached the armoured car intact. Somebody tried to speak to him, but he pushed them aside. He was shaking with rage and grief. He wanted to huddle down somewhere private and cry, but when he got into the backseat and turned his face away the tears wouldn’t come. He felt totally dry – no spit, no sweat, no tears. Like one of those trussed up, desiccated bundles you see in a spider’s web.
He still hadn’t cried for Ben. Missed the funeral. Hadn’t managed to squeeze out a single tear. But at least Kate had the amulet. That mattered. And he’d brought the last photographs back.
He walked down to the sea – calm today, creaming over on the sand, each wave withdrawing with a small rasping sound, like a tiger’s purr. Here the sand was partly shingle. He started searching about, looking for flat pebbles to skim, and had found five or six really good ones, when he heard a shout and turned to see Justine coming down the dunes towards him. Her hand went up and felt the padding round her nose, then to her scalp to check that the two barbed-wire fences were in place. Last night had been extraordinary – the sex passionate and yet interspersed with tender, almost sexless kisses. He had been so afraid of hurting her.
She came straight into his arms and kissed him.
‘Can you do that on the sea?’ she said, looking at the stones. ‘I thought it had to be calm water.’
‘It is calm. Look at it.’
She started searching for her own pebbles. Instant competition. That’s my girl.
‘No, too big. Here, have this,’ he said, giving her his best one.
They were intent, childlike, silly, innocent, though it was sex that had brought them to this state. His back hurt. Justine’s lips, breasts, thighs burned from contact with his chin.
She threw the first pebble. ‘Two.’
‘One and a bit.’
‘You’re a hard man, mister.’
He threw his f
irst pebble, which sank, ignominiously, with a detumescent plop. Justine started giggling. ‘Just you wait.’
This time he got the flick of his wrist exactly right. He knew, before the stone left his hand, that this one would walk, miraculously, across the water, each point of contact setting off concentric rings that would meet and overlap, creating little eddies of turbulence, but always, always spreading out, so that the ripples reached the shore, before, finally, it sank.
‘There,’ he said. ‘You see?’
Then he put his arm around her shoulders and they walked on, half in the water, half on land, while behind them the sun rose above the dunes, casting fine blue shadows of marram grass on to the white sand.
Author’s Note
My thanks go to Neil Darbyshire of the Daily Telegraph for enabling me to attend the opening of the Milosevic trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, and to Neil Tweedie, foreign correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, for helping to make my visit a pleasant experience.
I am grateful to Gillon Aitken and everybody at Gillon Aitken Associates for their continuing support, and to Simon Prosser and everybody at Hamish Hamilton for their enthusiastic publishing.
A special acknowledgement must go to Donna Poppy: the most tactful, conscientious and meticulous of editors.
No words can express what I owe to my husband.
Among the books I found thought-provoking and useful in the writing of this novel are Martin Bell’s In Harm’s Way, Julia Blackburn’s Old Man Goya, Fergal Keane’s Season of Blood, Don McCullin’s Unreasonable Behaviour, John Simpson’s Strange Places, Questionable People, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and Janis Tomlinson’s Goya.