Golden Hour (41 page)

“Look at that,” says Andrew. “Someone should look after this place.”

“It's got no utilities,” says Maggie.

“All it needs is a little love and care.”

The coach road is shady after the open Downs. They walk side by side, one in each tire track. Maggie recalls what Laura Broad said to her.

“It's like
Deal or No Deal
,” she says. “Do we settle for what we've got, or keep on hoping something better will turn up?”

“Or take what we've got and turn it into something better.”

“You think we could do that?”

“If you're up for it.”

“You just want somewhere to live near your new job.”

“True.”

“What if it doesn't work?”

“Then I go.”

He makes it sound so simple, and it just isn't simple. But maybe it's something else. Maybe it's possible.

“Stay tonight, at least.”

“I'd like that.”

“How about going to dinner with the Broads?”

“Okay with me.”

So instead of making a big decision about their future they make this small decision. They will go to the Broads' dinner party as a couple. Maybe it's pretending. Maybe it's practicing. But no one's deceiving anyone, and that makes everything possible.

“Where did you get it, Dean?”

“Brighton.”

“Where did you get it?”

“So someone nicked it and sold it on to the shop in Brighton. How was I to know?”

Sheena just goes on gazing at him and he feels like something's about to burst inside.

“She lost the ring on Thursday. Which is when you gave it to me. I'm not stupid. I can add up.”

“Well, fucking add up, then. What do I care?”

He looks round the room, and the thing inside is going to burst. His eyes are hot, his palms are sticky. He wants to hurt someone. His eyes fall on the toy fort.

“Fucking stupid kid's toy,” he says.

He picks it up off the table and throws it down hard on the floor. The guard tower snaps off. Plastic soldiers scatter over the carpet. He stamps on the fort, crushing it. Stamps again and again. Sheena just watches.

The fort breaks easily, it's only cheap matchboard. Soon it's nothing but a mess of fragments. He stops stamping on it, stands staring down at the wreckage, breathing hard. The thing inside still hasn't burst.

“You done?” says Sheena.

He doesn't answer.

“Now you listen to me,” says Sheena. “My boy's in hospital because he was stupid, and he's not going to be walking for three months. That's enough stupid for me, all right? I don't need it from you. Now tell me where you got the ring.”

Dean throws himself down onto the couch, and lies there face down.

“Nicked it,” he says to the cushions.

“You nicked it.”

“Yeah.”

“You're a bloody fool, Dean Keeley. What else did you take?”

“Nothing.”

“What other jobs have you done that I don't know about?”

“Nothing.”

“Just the one house? Just the ring?”

“Yeah.”

“You're a bloody fool, Dean Keeley. You don't go nicking stuff, you hear me? And if you do, you don't give it to me so I can wear it and the woman who lost it sees it on my hand.”

Dean groans into the cushion.

“What's that?” says Sheena.

“My fucking luck,” says Dean.

“Right,” says Sheena. “You're right about that. You got lucky, you did. Your stroke of luck was it was her daughter's car Chipper hit, so she's sorry for me. Otherwise you'd be answering questions down the station, wouldn't you? So you can thank your stars you caught a bit of luck, you can.”

Dean groans again.

“Now you clear up this mess on the floor.”

She removes herself to the kitchen.

Left alone, Dean can no longer hold down the feeling. He gives a great gulping sob and starts to cry, the tears stinging his
eyes, the sobs wrenching his chest. He wants to howl, so he pushes one fist into his mouth to block the sound. Then, still sobbing, his nose now running, he gets off the couch onto his knees on the floor, and starts picking up the pieces of the smashed fort.

When his hands are full he looks round blinking for somewhere to dump the debris. There's a wastepaper basket by the TV but it's too small. So he gets up and goes out through the conservatory to the garden and makes a pile on the pavers outside. He has a notion that he'll burn it later.

Back and forth he goes, clearing every last little stick. Sheena likes a job done properly. He picks up the plastic soldiers too, throws them onto the pile. Then he finds Brad, some distance away from the others.

Brad wouldn't have broken down like this. Brad would've given a shrug and said, “Win some, lose some.” This is what Brad does when a mission ends: he checks the damage, he cleans up any wounds, he rests. And then he moves on. He doesn't look back. Never look back.

Dean pushes the plastic soldier into his jeans pocket and goes out through the conservatory door, closing it softly behind him. He jumps the fence at the bottom of the garden and walks away fast down the road. Past the allotments, up the narrow path into the trees. Some kids on bikes messing about on the earth bank. He pays no attention, walks on. Past the gleam of low water in the ditch and out into the meadow, to the five-barred gate, to the kissing gate. Here he sinks down onto the grass and lowers his head, and sobs like a baby.

Never cried this way when Dad belted me. Never cried this way when I got sent down.

He pulls the plastic soldier out of his pocket and stands it up, facing him.

“Can't do it, mate,” he says. “Can't do it on my own.”

Someone is coming. He looks up. It's Sheena.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“Me too,” says Sheena. “I'm sorry too.”

“It's okay. I'll go.”

“Go? Where have you got to go to?”

“Don't know,” says Dean. “Not your problem.”

His mouth feels as if it's full of glue and the words come out with difficulty.

“I don't want you to go. I want you to stop behaving like a bloody fool.”

“Did it for you,” he says, very low. But she hears him.

“You think that makes it all right?”

But he can hear it in her voice. It does make it all right. There's that old tenderness come back. A rush of sweet relief flows through him. If Sheena will stick by me, nothing else matters.

“Did it so we could be married,” he says.

“That doesn't make stealing right, babe.”

“You weren't supposed to know.”

“You know what, Deanie? I didn't mind one bit giving that ring back. It felt like that was the only reason Chipper didn't die. They told me at the hospital he was lucky to be alive. So she got her ring back, and I got my boy back.”

“Talk about luck.”

“It's not luck, babe. It's meant. These things don't go the way they do for no reason. Now come here. Give me a cuddle.”

He gets up and goes into her soft white arms and presses her close, smelling her sweet warm smell.

“Least you didn't nick the sunset,” she says.

That makes him smile.

“Now wipe your nose. We're going out.”

“Where are we going?”

“We're going to the hospital to see how Chipper's coming along. But we're stopping at the shops on the way.”

They drive out in Dean's van and park in the Priory car park. Sheena leads Dean over Cliffe Bridge past the Big Issue seller and his dog to Argos on the far side.

“What do we want in Argos?” he says.

“You know what we want,” says Sheena.

She opens the catalog at the jewelry section and finds the pages of rings. Dean is silent, watching her as she searches the plastic-coated pages. His heart is too full for words.

Sheena pulls over an order form and picks up one of the stubby pens, made specially short so no one will want to steal them.

“This is what we need,” she says. “This is perfect.”

It's a nine-carat-gold ruby-and-diamond heart ring. It costs
£
49.99. Not real ruby and diamond, of course. They call it “created ruby and diamond.”

“Created just for us,” says Sheena.

There's a bundle of plastic rings by the counter you use for sizing your finger. Then you wait your turn in the queue to order. Then you wait for the item to be brought up from the stockroom. Throughout this process Dean says nothing. He assumed their engagement ended when the stolen ring was given back to its true owner. Now here comes another ring.

He can't believe Sheena's generosity. She hasn't said she forgives him but here she is buying another ring.

It comes in a little hinged plastic box. They take it out of the shop into the sunlight. The street is crowded with Saturday shoppers. They find a bench on the bridge by the Big Issue seller and sit down side by side. Sheena gives Dean the box, and he takes out the ring.

“You haven't changed your mind?”

“No,” she says.

“Do I go down on my knee again?”

“No. You've done that bit.”

“Here it is, then.”

“Here it is, then?” She laughs as she repeats his words back at him. “Is that the best you can do?”

“It isn't as good as the other one,” says Dean, “and I haven't even paid for it, but my love's the same. More, even.”

“That's better.”

She puts the ring on her ring finger. Then they kiss.

“All right for some,” says the Big Issue seller. “All I've got is a bloody dog.”

Henry sits in his study, gazing out of the window at the garden. He's shut himself away here because he has a decision to make about his future, or supposes he has.

The view out of his window is deeply familiar: the garden framed by tall elms, dominated by the great heave in the land that is Mount Caburn. The ridge at the top that was once an Iron Age fort pulls him back down the centuries, places his present concerns in the majestic and merciful sweep of time. And there, in his nearer view, on the grass of the lawn, representing a beginning rather than an end, sit Carrie and Toby, cross-legged on the grass, deep in conversation.

How am I supposed to manage this business of growing older? Don't tell me the best is now past.

He remembers then how as a boy he would always pace his passing days round delights to come. He was a great one for looking forward. It could be something as small as knowing there'd be pizza for supper, or it could be one of the grand holidays, birthday, Christmas. Always the present moment was made brighter by a light shining from the near future. Such an arrangement works because we live our lives forward. If the bright lights are in the past, their glow no longer carries the excitement of expectation. Turn that way, look back that way, and all you feel is the ache of regret.

His unseeing gaze catches a tremor of movement in the long grass beyond the border. His attention returns with a snap. Was that a rabbit?

He goes to the window and looks out into the orchard. Yes, he sees it clearly for a brief moment. A rabbit making for the fence.

He goes out onto the terrace, not hurrying, knowing he's too late, wanting only to discover where the defensive wall has been breached. As he crosses the lawn, Carrie and Toby don't look up, don't even seem to notice him. He patrols the orchard fence, looking for holes in the wire, but finds nothing. Then returning down the close-mown strip beside the fence he spots rabbit droppings. A little further into the orchard, by the roots of an old apple tree, he finds a rabbit hole. They've tunneled in.

You have to hand it to rabbits. They don't give up. Such a deal of effort, and all to break in to a garden that when all's said and done is much like the meadow outside. Surely it can't be worth it? Then it strikes him that maybe his mental map is wrong; or rather, meaningful for him, but not for the rabbits. In his map there is a strip of land bounded by tree, fences, walls, that belongs to him and is called his home and garden. In the rabbits' map there is only land. The land extends in all directions, and the rabbits' imperative is to roam ever further in search of food. The obstacles they encounter have no meaning. Meeting a barrier, they press onwards, going round and over and under, seeking any passage through, in the way that water will always find a channel. Think of the rabbits as water, as wind, as weather, and the goal of shutting them out of the garden becomes laughable. All you can do is stuff the leaks with newspaper, and make repairs in the fabric after each winter's storms.

He hunts out a medium-sized log from the woodpile and
hammers it with his heel into the rabbit hole. He knows this won't stop them. They'll dig round it. But it'll slow them down.

So have I surrendered? Have the rabbits won?

It feels like something else, something that has wider-reaching implications. It's a kind of a truce, something less than victory but more than defeat. A realization that the conflict will never end, but that this state of affairs is in fact manageable. An acceptance of imperfection.

Humility again.

So returning slowly through the orchard, his recent thoughts combine in his mind, and together they add up to a revelation. That dark cloud of dread that rolled toward him down Artillery Row was no external reality, as he supposed, not the unbearable truth of his own meaninglessness, but a hallucination, a projection by himself of his own fears. Demand a life of ever-mounting achievement and of course disappointment lies ahead. But such a demand is self-created, unachievable, foolish. Life is not a staircase. To each age certain ways of being are appropriate. There are high points and low points, the graph tracks many lines. Income, status, health, happiness, all peak and trough at differing times. How then can you ever say the best is past?