The Girl With Glass Feet (29 page)

‘Do you know what it’s like to lose someone, Midas?’

‘Yes.’

‘Someone you were in love with?’

‘No.’

‘Have you ever
been
in love?’

‘Erm…’

Hector’s eyes narrowed. He grinned wolfishly. ‘You are at this precise moment! It’s written all over you.’

Midas looked down at himself, as if expecting this literally to be the case.

‘If you are in love,’ Hector said, and his voice seemed deeper and flintier, ‘you should take her away from Enghem. You should take her away from St Hauda’s Land. There’s something in the very earth of this place.’

As if to prove it he drove his cane into the soil and flicked up a sod of earth. All that lay beneath was more damp soil, and a worm twisting over itself to escape the sudden light.

‘I think…’ said Midas slowly, ‘I might be.’

‘Might be what?’

Midas cleared his throat. ‘In love.’

Hector threw his arms wide open. ‘Then always make sure you
act
like it.’

With that he gave a kind of salute, turned, and marched away. Midas was left to find his way back to the house by getting lost in different directions. It was amazing how far the woods seemed to stretch, when there had appeared to be so few trees from the house. He wished he’d had a ball of twine, like in one of the half-remembered stories his father had told him.

The plants grew at different heights over the uneven ground, and the half-path he followed wavered between them. Heavy branches creaked like masts. Roots grew outstretched like the arms of beggars.

He was grateful when he saw an opening in the trees, and through it the house up ahead. He was almost at the front door when he heard his name called.

Carl Maulsen was smoking a cigarette by the steps to the deck. He beckoned to Midas. ‘What were you doing out in the woods?’

‘Walking.’

Carl nodded. ‘We didn’t know what had happened to you.’

‘The light was too fine to stay in bed.’

He narrowed his eyes and dragged on his cigarette. ‘You shouldn’t have gone out like that, you’ve been gone for hours. We started the remedy while you were gone, even though Ida said she wanted you here.’

Midas kicked at the shingle. He hadn’t realized he had been gone for so long. If he went to find Ida now he’d have to explain his disappearance as well as the failed kiss.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Don’t apologize to
me
.’ He stubbed the cigarette against one of the stilts of the house.

Suddenly something shot out from behind the house. Midas
looked up in alarm as a hare weaved across the grass and sprinted into the wood.

‘You scare easy, Midas.’

‘It startled me, that’s all.’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘It’s freezing out here. I’m going to go inside and get warm.’

Carl held out his packet of cigarettes. ‘Help yourself.’

Midas shook his head.

‘Don’t be a sissy. We haven’t finished talking.’

He offered the cigarette again and Midas took one with blue fingers. He held it awkwardly, trying to remember the last time he’d smoked. Probably as a kid when playground bullies called him a sissy if he refused. He put it between his lips. Carl took a match from a packet, struck it and reached over to light Midas’s cigarette. Midas flinched at the proximity of the flame and the bigger man’s hand.

Carl deftly tipped out a cigarette of his own and lit it before the match went out. ‘I wanted to ask you something. Concerning your father.’

The cigarette smoke became a frost on Midas’s tonsils. ‘What about him?’

‘See if I can jog your memory. His work. What do you think of it?’

‘Do you mean what do I think of it now, or what did I think of it? When I was a very little boy I naturally thought he was a genius. My father was the cleverest scholar on the earth. Whereas now…’

‘I understand that I’m being impertinent, but your father’s thoughts have always exerted quite a hold over me.’ He flicked ash from his cigarette. ‘I credit them, in fact, with the birth of my own academic career. But your father could be… difficult.’

Midas swallowed hard. ‘Well. It’s easier to come across as eloquent when you only have to do it in writing.’

‘I’m not criticizing him.’ He puffed at his cigarette. ‘I bring it up because that kind of difficulty is the last thing Ida needs.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘He had the finest academic brain I’ve known. He could dissect a thought like a physician dissecting a body. So I’m not saying he was lacking as a person. But I never even saw a glimmer of romance in him. In fact, even his studies, to which he devoted so much, didn’t seem to move him or inspire him one jot. I don’t know what kept him going, really.’

‘He didn’t
keep going
, did he?’

Carl raised his hands. ‘Sure. Whatever. I can clearly see it’s too raw for you.’

‘Yes,’ said Midas, ‘it is.’

Carl shifted his position. ‘He said once that the personalities of a person throughout their lifetime are like clothes worn over the course of a day, layered up to preserve dignity or weather the environment. He said it was possible for a person to be caught out this way. Imagine, if you will, the man who has put on a heavy coat, mittens, warm hat and scarf to brave a blizzard. His mind and body are attuned to the task ahead – that is, stepping out into the snowstorm. So if he doesn’t hear through his earmuffs a whispered voice behind him pleading for him not to go, or feel a gentle tug at one of the layers of thick clothing he’s put on, he can hardly be blamed. He has simply made one adaptation at the expense of another.’

‘Look, I don’t understand any of that stuff of my father’s,’ said Midas. His teeth were beginning to chatter.

Carl reached across and cuffed him playfully on the shoulder. ‘Listen, about Ida… She needs to focus on getting better right now, that’s all I’m saying. Not on anything else, okay? Don’t feel bad about letting her down like you did this morning, just make sure she doesn’t have to deal with your problems on top of hers.’

Midas felt like he’d swallowed a jug of ice. Fists clenched in his pockets, he told Carl as forcefully as he could manage that he was going inside.

Midas would need to load the photograph on to his computer to zoom in on the white bird’s eye in perfect detail, but he sat on the corner of his bed in the Stallowses’ house and he already knew he hadn’t been mistaken. The eye and the eyelid were white as the snow outside. It made him think about his run-in with Hector, which had felt strange, dreamlike. And the strangest thing of all was what Hector had made him say.
I might be in love
.

He got up to look out of the window. He wanted to escape the house again. Earlier, at lunch with Carl and Emiliana, eating fresh white fish from the cove, Ida hadn’t even looked at him and he couldn’t manage a word to anyone. She had seemed worn out from the poultices Carl and Emiliana had spent the morning applying. When she had come to the table she had done so even more slowly than she normally would, as if both the crutch he had bought her and her old one together were no match for her body. Afterwards Emiliana disappeared and Carl took Ida aside to talk to her in serious tones. Midas had washed up, thinking about his father’s forearms covered in dishwater bubbles.

Now in his guest bedroom, with its whitewashed walls and sheer white sheets, he tried to remember that Ida had invited him here. As moral support. But as something else? Her lips had approached his, too delightful to meet. She would think he had shunned her, and now he wanted a second chance, to receive those lips and reach around her waist. He could fantasize about it, but he wasn’t sure, given that chance, he would take it.

He heard a brittle knock on the bedroom door. He spun around, straightening his hair, terrified at once of Ida stepping in
to confront him. If she were coming to tell him he had blown it and should make his way home, well… He suddenly realized he wanted to put off that moment for as long as he could. He kept quiet, not daring to make another movement, hoping she’d think he wasn’t in.

After a second knock the door opened anyway. It was Emiliana.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. You didn’t answer so I didn’t think you were here. May I come in?’

‘Um. Of course. Yes.’ He hung his head. So Ida’s verdict would not even be delivered in person. It was Emiliana’s house, so it made sense that she would be the one to tell him to leave. She pushed the bedroom door shut behind her.

‘I brought you this.’ She held out a scratched leather satchel covered with pouches and poppers. He took it and guessed its contents at once from its weight.

‘Um…’ he said.

‘It’s for you.’

‘Th-thank you.’

Emiliana sat down slowly on the bed, smoothing her skirt over her thighs.

‘Open it, then.’

He unzipped the main compartment and took out the camera. It was the kind of old SLR that would have cost thousands of pounds in its day. The bag juggled with lenses and attachments. The camera’s grip was made from worn snakeskin.

‘It was Hector’s. Photography was a hobby of his, once upon a time. He hasn’t touched that camera in years. Nor will he. Don’t worry, I’ve had it looked after, like so many of the other things he’s abandoned. I’m a human broom, tidying things up in his wake. I took it to a specialist on the mainland, thinking I might play around with it, but I don’t seem capable of finding the time. And it’s such a terrible waste to have it lying around. Perhaps you’ll make better use of it.’

A childish grin spread across his face. He turned it on and played with the aperture dial, using Emiliana’s sharp profile and the black of her hair as his subject. It was so easy to forget the pleasures of older cameras: the trust you had to place in instinct instead of display screens. ‘Stop photographing me,’ she said, with mild irritation.

‘I was just… experimenting.’

‘I know. I just… don’t like having my photo taken these days.’

He slung it over his neck so it hung side by side with his digital, the two lens caps nuzzling each other.

‘So,’ said Emiliana, ‘you have time for a little chat?’

He swallowed, suddenly feeling the weight of both cameras tugging on his neck.
God
, this was it.

‘Midas, why don’t you sit with me?’

He did as he was told. The mattress was soft as he sat down beside her. He could smell her perfume, something shocking and alcoholic that ghosted through his lungs into his gut. He wondered what the SLR she’d given him would have done in the test shots he had just taken. It would have recorded truthfully the crow’s feet she’d painted closed with her make-up.

‘It’s about Ida,’ she said.

‘You’ve started curing her.’

‘Ye-es. It might not be as easy as that.’

He shook his head, becoming cautiously optimistic that he wasn’t being told to leave the house, becoming anxious that he was being told something worse.

‘It might be difficult.’

‘Why? You cured Saffron Jeuck.’

‘That was different.’ She sighed. ‘In my youth I was of course in better shape than I am now. I was approached several times by scouts who saw modelling potential in me. I’m only telling you this because… I hope it’ll help you understand, when you’ve heard it all.

‘At this time I first met Carl. I had been married two years and
was already realizing that, in Hector, I had a very different sort of husband to the one I had anticipated. I loved him, you must understand. And I still do. But it was a love born out of great comfort and not out of…’ She sighed and threw her head back, her black hair tossing. He felt the mattress move beneath them. The cameras clinked on his chest.

‘There was no sex, to put it bluntly. Because Hector, although he is a man of passions, is most peculiar. Amber in the trees. The quartz room. The aviary of birds born mute. As I say, I love him, Midas, as one might love one’s brother. But for a young woman like I was at the time, who had been commended for her looks and who was hungry to… make the most of them…’ She looked Midas dead in the eye. ‘Well, I needed more than that. So. That was when I met Carl Maulsen. In those days the idea of an open relationship was still rather new. People were naïve about it, hadn’t foreseen the inevitable emotional entanglements.’

Midas nodded to appear understanding, even though this frank talk of Emiliana’s sex life was making his palms itch and his back sweat. Worse, he’d had no idea that she and Carl had once had… an involvement. What else had he been too naïve to pick up on? He wanted to bolt out of the door. Ten times already he had pictured himself crashing through the window and plunging to the snowy garden beneath. All the same he was rooted to the spot. He examined the topography of her as she talked, the wrinkles across her neck that traced its length into three equal segments. The contours from her collarbone, over her chest and then out over the tops of her breasts, the skin that would once have been tight now lax. Her scent lay heavy in his stomach like a sheet of iron.

‘What I’m trying to say, Midas, is that when a person feels imprisoned by their circumstances, they make mistakes.’