Authors: Lucie Whitehouse
‘It was dreadful for Dad. He used to be a research scientist but there wasn’t any money in it so he gave it up and retrained as a physics teacher so he earned a bit more and had the holidays. He’s shy, my dad – I think he found it really hard to start with, standing up in front of a room of teenagers day after day. He did it, though.’ Now I’d started, the story was coming more easily; it was spilling out. ‘He’s incredible – I didn’t realise till I got older how much he’d given up. It’s only in the past couple of years that he’s even had anyone else serious – he was single until Matt and I went to college, and even then he found it hard. I think it took him years to get over her and then he didn’t want to risk getting close to anyone again in case it didn’t work out. He wouldn’t have risked it, for our sake.’
‘Why did she leave?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. She met him – restaurant man. Maybe she thought she was too young to be tied down. Maybe we weren’t the exciting English life she’d had in mind when she came here.’
‘Was she happy? She must have regretted leaving you, surely.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t care. She made the decision – the rest of us just had to live with it.’ The feeling I got when I thought about her was rising up through me and I didn’t want to talk about it any more. I took another sip of my wine and looked away, over to the fireplace where the dog, now abandoned in favour of ice-cream sundaes, was snoozing gratefully.
‘I’m glad you told me,’ said Richard. He half-stood, and leaned across the table to catch my face in his hands and kiss me. ‘It means a lot that you trust me.’
‘Urgh,’ said one of the little girls. ‘That’s disgusting.’
Richard grinned and sat back down again. ‘Sorry,’ he said, nodding an apology to her. ‘But it was very important. I won’t do it again.’
‘OK, then,’ she looked away, suddenly shy.
We had the heater on in the car on the way back and I leaned my head against the window and drifted in and out of a wine-induced doze while Richard gamed our way into London. He was humming quietly and I felt the strengthening of bonds between us, a drawing closer.
When we turned the lights off that night, I lay awake. There was a breeze outside and the streetlamps around the garden square behind the building were casting shadows of the topmost branches of the trees on to the strip of ceiling in front of the arrow-slit window. I watched as they moved gently back and forth like stroking fingers. Richard was on his side facing me, his hand resting in its familiar place on my thigh. His eyes were closed but he wasn’t quite asleep. He’d been tender with me all evening and just now when we’d had sex, too, as if what I’d told him earlier had cracked the tough shell I’d presented him with before and made him aware that I, too, had fragilities. There was a dull ache in my torso that I couldn’t locate precisely to either my heart or my stomach and I realised that I was mourning these days already. ‘Wouldn’t it be good if we could be together like this always?’ I said quietly into the darkness.
‘Hmm.’ He was almost asleep now but his fingers moved across my skin and brushed lightly over my pubic hair, before resting there.
‘Why don’t we do it?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Why don’t we? Move in together?’
His eyes came open immediately. I turned to look at him. The thin gap between the window and the blind let in enough light for me to see that he was suddenly wide awake. ‘Sorry – that was a bit of a surprise,’ I said.
‘It certainly was,’ he said, and there was a touch of relief in his voice, as if he’d taken me for serious at first and now realised I was joking. The ache changed, became a pang of alarm. What I heard was distance, and a little of our new closeness seemed to evaporate. I knew I should leave it, have the conversation another time, but I couldn’t stop myself.
‘Is it a ridiculous idea?’ I said.
He hesitated. I watched his shadowed face and it occurred to me that he was deciding how to compose it, how he was going to handle this situation that I had suddenly thrust on him when he was happy and comfortable, tired and slightly dazed with food and wine and sex. He was working out how to handle me.
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, moving his hand back on to my thigh. ‘You know I’m not ready. I’ve just got out of a long-term relationship. I need a bit of time before I can commit to anything else. Come on, you know that.’ His voice was coaxing now, as if he was talking to a recalcitrant child.
I felt a rush of anger and shifted, dislodging his hand. ‘Actually, I don’t know. I know you were in a long relationship but that’s all you’ve told me about it – in six months.’ I realised as I said it that it was true and also that I’d never asked. At the beginning I hadn’t wanted to press him until he was ready to tell me or to give him the upper hand in our semi-joking battle of wills by letting him know that I thought about it, and then, after time passed, I hadn’t wanted to think about him with another woman. ‘You can’t really expect me to understand when I don’t know what I’m supposed to be understanding,’ I said. ‘I mean, obviously it was important but I thought perhaps this might be important, too.’
He groaned. ‘Don’t be like this.’
‘I’m not being like anything.’ I turned away from him, embarrassed to have abandoned the lightness I’d calibrated so carefully and revealed that I had hopes for our future. I knew with a swift certainty that I had misjudged things. If he felt about me as I did about him, there was no way he would be reacting like this.
‘Please don’t cry,’ he said, his voice sounding as if it came from a distance.
‘I’m not crying,’ I said, furious. I didn’t turn back to him and he made no move towards me. We lay like that for some minutes. I waited for him to go to sleep so that I could get up and go into the sitting room to order my thoughts without causing a scene. His breathing, though, stayed the same.
‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ he said eventually.
‘You make it sound as if I’m putting you in an unbearable position,’ I said. ‘I’m not, OK? It was just a stupid, off-the-cuff, spur-of-the moment idea. Just forget about it – it’s not important.’
He sighed. ‘Of course it’s important.’
I turned round. ‘Look, I got it wrong. I’m sorry. That’s all we need to say. Subject closed.’
He grabbed my wrist, pinching my skin against the edge of the bangle which I was still wearing.
‘Ow, that hurts, Richard.’
He gripped harder. ‘I’m just trying to understand what you want from me.’
‘I don’t want anything. I just want you to let go.’
He did then and my arm dropped as if it were a dead weight. To my shame, I felt tears in my eyes now and I turned away from him quickly before he could see. This time, though, he moved across the bed and put his arm around my waist. ‘Sssh,’ he whispered. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’
My body was rigid with tension and I couldn’t make myself relax back against him. ‘I just don’t understand why it’s such a big deal,’ I said.
‘For fuck’s sake.’ He was out of bed in a second. The half light cast shadows over his body and it looked different to me now, hostile. I couldn’t imagine how only minutes ago I had pressed myself against it so willingly.
‘Why are you so angry?’ I wept, sitting up and pulling my knees to my chest.
‘You just have to keep pushing, don’t you? Why can’t you just leave it alone? You’re ruining everything – you’re making me do this.’
‘What?’ I heard the note of alarm in my voice.
‘You’re doing this. You’re making me tell you. I can’t move in with you, Kate,’ he lunged towards me and brought his face right up to mine, making sure I couldn’t look away, grabbing my wrist again and holding it hard. I could smell the alcohol on his breath and, partially masked, the cigarette that he’d had after supper. His eyes were completely cold. ‘Because I’m married to someone else.’
Chapter Eleven
Last year it had drizzled on Christmas morning but today the sky was as blue as if it were June. Looking over the harbour from my bedroom window, I felt a pressing need to be outside and I got dressed and left the house straight away. As soon as the door closed behind me, though, I realised that the sun was deceptive. There was no heat in the day at all; instead it was so cold that the air tasted metallic.
Coming up Bridge Road towards the Square it was hard to miss the word that had been spray-painted on to the wall of the churchyard. bollocks was spelled out in red letters three feet high, clearly legible to the nearest-sighted of the congregation at the morning service. Even for me, it was shocking – the sheer unlikeliness of it. In London, graffiti was everywhere; I scarcely even noticed it. Here, however, it was extraordinary, almost anachronistic. I remembered the women I’d heard talking outside the delicatessen the morning I’d met Sally, though, and the graffiti at the bus stop; evidently it wasn’t an unknown phenomenon. But who was doing it? I’d hardly even seen anyone young here, let alone a gang.
In the Square every shop was shut, even the corner shop which I’d only ever seen closed at night. The café at the far end was shut, too, and beyond it, the pier extended over the water like the beginning of a bridge which had run out of steam. Walking out on to it, I could feel the sea slapping against the thick wooden struts which anchored it into the seabed. The water changed colour wherever I looked at it. To my left, down the channel towards the Needles, it was a dappling aquamarine, its surface denting and pixilating where the wind blew at it, but beneath me, in the shadow of the boardwalk, it was a deeper, darker green. Away from the shelter of the buildings, the bitterness of the wind made my eyes stream. When I reached the end I leaned against the railing and looked over to the mainland, which the sterile light had brought into high definition. The towers of the oil refinery at Fawley were sharp as needles. There were only two yachts out, one down near Hurst, the other near the entrance to the Lymington River, tacking now to get out of the path of one of the few ferries that would be running today.
I turned around to look at the town. There were lights on at almost every one of the windows at the George, the rooms full of people who’d come for a smart hotel Christmas. It would be packed for lunch later. I scanned along to the yacht club and the large houses that bordered on to the water. There was a flagpole in the garden of the huge Victorian house with the crenellated roofline; the flag, a Union Jack, had been savaged by the elements and now flapped in faded tatters. Below me, a handful of scows like Alice’s faced the end of the pier like a congregation in front of a pulpit, headed neatly into the wind. I wondered how Peter Frewin would be spending the day, without her.
I turned the other way and saw that the ferry had made good progress, moving towards the Island while I wasn’t looking as if it were playing a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. My hands were beginning to hurt with the cold but I didn’t want to go back to the cottage; at least while I was out, I could pretend to be part of the world. Inside, it would only be me and the reality of my decision to stay here alone over the holiday. Dad and Matt would ring from America later but I knew the call would make me lonelier, with its background of happy voices and then the silence when the receiver went down. Well, it didn’t matter anyway, I thought: I would get drunk.
Back at the house I lit the fire, switched the oven on and poured a glass of sherry. There hadn’t seemed any point in cooking a turkey just for myself so I’d bought a chicken instead with the idea of roasting it today and eating the rest cold. I peeled the vegetables, washed the knives and put the chicken in the oven. After that I went through to the sitting room and stood at the sliding doors looking at the yard. There was no view over the wooden fences on either side and, from the ground floor, it was impossible to see over the gates at the end. When I’d been at the sink scoring the sprouts, a couple I hadn’t seen before had passed in front of the window on their way to a house further down but it was quiet now, no voices or music coming from either of my neighbours. The silence started to flood in and I quickly switched on the television to block it.
I poured another glass of sherry and took it upstairs. The bed was already made but I tweaked the blanket so that it lay straight and hung up the shirt that I’d left over the back of the chair. My book was lying face down on the carpet, pages splayed, and I picked it up, marked my place with the envelope I used and put it on the bedside table. Out on the landing again I stopped in front of the mirror and looked at myself. My hair was knotted from the wind but there was some colour in my cheeks from being outside and the ring under my eye and the stitches were now long gone.
I turned and paused at the door to the second bedroom. The manuscript was on the desk, along with the handwritten translation of the latest chapter. I went in for a second to look at it, then picked up the pen and made a small correction to an awkward sentence. I’d told myself that I wouldn’t work today but now it seemed preferable to hanging listlessly round the house. As a compromise, I decided that I would just type up the pages that I’d already done but when I finished them, I found myself going on to the next section and by the time I looked up, an hour and a half had passed. My glass was empty, the house was filled with the smell of roasting chicken and I could make out the sound of carols on the television. Before going downstairs, I opened up my email account just in case there was anything. Perhaps Dad had emailed to wish me a happy Christmas before we spoke later on. When it came up, the home screen told me that there was indeed a message and when I clicked on the inbox there it was.