The Summer We All Ran Away (12 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Joshua
,

The beans are ripe now, and the tomatoes are finally starting to ripen. If I'm still here next year, I think I'll put in some raspberry canes. The soil's good for it, nice and light and sandy. Good for everything, really. I'll put in some potatoes for next year too. West Country potatoes are famous, apparently. Kate tells me people sell them by the sackful at the roadside, and tourists take them home with them along with their dirty washing
.

I'm writing nonsense about the garden because I'm still nervous. In fact, I'm still frightened. Weeks and weeks and weeks since I ran for it, and I'm still looking over my shoulder the whole time. I get nervous when I'm inside. I don't like the door being shut just in case I can't get it open again. If I saw a doctor, it's possible he'd have a name for it. Claustrophobia, maybe? Post-traumatic stress disorder? Those decades in a cell have taken their toll
.

I ought to say I'm sorry, I suppose. When I started writing this letter, that's what I meant to do. It was a terrible thing I did. But I had a chance, and I had to take it
.

I don't deserve any of what I've got now. And believe me, I've got a lot. I don't have any money, or even a real name, but that's okay. I've got a roof over my head and food in my belly, people I can more or less call friends, and a garden I can call my own
.

I don't deserve any of it, but I'm grateful. I didn't deserve the chance to escape either, but I got it
.

You know, I've written so many letters to you, but this is
the one I might actually post. It's been a whole summer, and the world hasn't ended because one man escaped prison. I'll travel a bit so the postmark won't match and you won't have the dilemma of coming to look for me, and then I'll post it
.

I hope all's well with you
.

Tom

chapter eight (then)

“Why does he sleep in a tent when we've got so many bedrooms?” asked Jack.

Mathilda was lying on the rug by the open window in the library, basking in the late afternoon sunshine, her eyes tightly shut, a dog-eared copy of
Hamlet
beside her. Jack, tired with the thankless effort of composing, thought she had never looked so beautiful as in this moment of uncharacteristic laziness. But then he had this thought at least twenty times a day. Her face, far too arresting for the commonplace nothingness of “pretty”, fascinated him from every angle. He'd seen Isaac watching her too, on golden afternoons where the two men lay around the lawns or the veranda, juggling pencils and beer and guitars and paper as Mathilda, as unselfconscious as if she were utterly alone, experimented with incarnations of Nora.

“He said permanent structures made him uneasy.” A breeze ruffled Mathilda's hair and blew a strand across her mouth. She blew it back impatiently.

“How could he possibly tell you that?”

“Oh, you know Isaac. He's good at getting his point across.”

“I suppose.”

He glanced at his notepad. He didn't like any of the words or any of the music. Was it always this difficult to start?
Landmark
had been a picnic compared to this new project, but then,
Violet Hour
had seemed that way compared to
Landmark
.

He looked at Mathilda again. He longed to lie beside her and peel off her rainbow-patterned t-shirt and faded bell-bottoms, to kiss her stomach and her long thighs and make slow, clumsy love to her in the sunshine. Today, and unusually for the last few weeks, they were alone. Isaac was the most perfect house guest imaginable. Although he spent hours every day with them, watching and listening as Jack desultorily experimented with words and melodies and Mathilda transformed herself into other people, Jack rarely felt his presence as intrusive. But today he'd disappeared entirely, leaving a note on the kitchen table consisting of a child's sketch of a boat with a triangular sail and a clock with a moon drawn next to it.

Mathilda's cool white skin had borrowed the gold of the sunlight. Jack considered the word
Baltic
, crossed it out and replaced it with
frozen
, reconsidered, put
Baltic
back in again. Neither word said what he really wanted. He looked again at Mathilda, felt his heart squeeze tight.

Did Isaac lie awake on these warm scented nights and dream of her? Did he strain his ears for the sound of Jack making love to her, stroking himself to a silent climax, fantasising it was him instead?

“He gave me a present yesterday,” he said out loud.

“What was it?”

“A painting.”

“That's nice. What of?”

“He said it was a whale's pancreas. Apparently I'll understand what he means one day.” Mathilda snorted with laughter. “It's sort of great, in a weird way. I was going to hang it in the bedroom. If that's alright with you.”

“Why wouldn't it be?”

“Apparently some people find it hard to sleep in rooms containing the internal organs of large aquatic mammals.”

“Really?”

“They did a study. It was in the paper the other day. I should have saved it.”

She turned over onto her stomach and rested her chin on her hands. “I want to ask you something.”

“If you want my whale's pancreas, it'll cost you.”

“Isaac wants to paint me.”

Jack felt as if every muscle in his body had winced. He forced a casual shrug. “Okay.”

He was insane to be worried. Neither Isaac nor Mathilda had done anything to give him reason to be jealous.

“You're sure?”

“Would it matter if I wasn't?”

“Well, of course it matters. I love you,” she continued, as if this was obvious, “so obviously what you think counts. I mean, if it was a role where I had to be naked, well, that's different, that's my job, but this is just for a friend. Are you alright?”

“Could you possibly say that again, please?”

“It's just for a friend.”

“No, the first bit - ”

“Oh!” She smiled. “Why? Do you need reassurance?”

“Please.”

“I love you,” she said, with a shrug. “Do the words make such a difference? You knew anyway.”

“No, I didn't know, of course I didn't, how could I possibly know? I had no idea - ”

“How could you not know?”

“Because you never
said!”

“I'm living here with you, aren't I? I get into your bed every night, don't I? I gave my agent your phone number, that's about as committed as actors get.”

“How can you be so calm about this?”

“It's just three words.”

“Describing the most important emotion on earth!”

“Why are you so angry?”

“I'm not angry, I'm - ”

“Yes?”

Frantic
, he thought.
Lost. Ecstatic. Bewildered. Besotted
.
Adoring. Crazy for you
.

He put his arms around her. Words weren't enough, words were tricky and confusing, he was tangled and lost in words. He could only show her with his body, with his fingers and his tongue and his cock, with the slow rhythm and melody of two bodies perfectly in tune. The sofa seemed too impossibly far away to even contemplate. He loved her on the sun-warmed floor instead, oblivious to the hard surface beneath them, the words beating in his blood.
I love you. I love you. I love you, so -

When they lay speechless in each other's arms, Mathilda drowsing and drifting towards sleep, he forced himself to focus on the memory of her face as she said it. The other word,
naked
, gnawed at him, but he refused to dwell on it.

I love you, so -

As if it was so obvious no-one could miss it.

As if no-one could ever doubt it.

He woke to an agonising cramp in his left leg and the sound of the telephone. Mathilda was still deeply asleep, her head on his shoulder, her arm flung across his chest. Trying not to yelp with pain, he eased himself out from beneath her. She sighed and stirred, but did not wake. He had noticed before that when she slept, she would stay locked in her own private realm whatever happened around her, impossible to rouse until she was ready. He grabbed his jeans, limped into the hall and picked up the receiver.

“I'm still not doing the tour,” he said, pulling on his jeans.

“Yes, you are, you just don't know it yet. The kids are all set, studio at the end of next month. We'll be in Soho, since you burned my place to the ground.”

“I
didn't
burn your office down - really, all of them? Even Joey?”

“Even Joey.”

“I thought he signed on with Badwater.”

“I signed him off again. Guess how I did it.”

Jack pulled the zip cautiously upwards. “You clubbed him over the head and dragged him away by his hair?”

“Promised him the tour of the century.”

“You what?”

“You heard.”

“You - you utter unbelievable arsehole!”

“You utter ungrateful tosser! I have pulled off a fucking
miracle
here. I got your kids back from some of the hottest fucking acts on the planet, just so you can have the right backup to do this album how you want. The least you can do is - ”

“Give you my soul?”

“What the fuck am I going to do with your soul? Just give me thirty dates. Three months, that's all I'm asking!”

“No!”

“Too late. Done deal. See you in Soho. Details in the post.

Bye.”

As Jack slammed the receiver down, Isaac wandered in through the doorway.

“Oh,” said Jack, without thinking. “I thought you were out for the day.” Isaac looked towards the door. “Sorry, I didn't mean it like that.” But of course he had, and he suspected Isaac knew it.

Isaac picked up an envelope from the doormat and held it out.

“Is that for me? Thanks.” He knew without looking it was from Evie. She'd written every few days since he saw her in London.

Isaac looked at him reproachfully.

“I'll open it later,” he told Isaac.

Isaac looked sceptical. In spite of himself, Jack remembered the pile of unopened envelopes stacked up in his bedroom in the hidden annexe. It was an act of cowardice to ignore them, he knew.

“How was the boat?” he asked. Isaac mimed choppy water, then seasickness. In spite of himself, Jack laughed. Isaac was almost maddeningly likeable. Despite the rat's gnaw of unease
over Mathilda, it was impossible to stay angry with him.

Determined not to play the jealous lover, Jack deliberately stayed out of Isaac and Mathilda's way for the next few days. He found things to do in the garden, in other parts of the house, in the outhouses he was slowly reclaiming from the ivy. One was now stacked to the brim with load after load of logs, purchased from the imperturbable farmer, fifteen miles away, who also supplied him with meat for the panther. Jack had grown up with open fires, but had never split his own logs and kindling before. After an hour or so of dangerously hit-and-miss efforts with the wood axe, he finally began to find the rhythm, and chopped wood like a maniac until he was soaked with sweat and his palms were covered in blisters.

“Soft Southern wanker,” he said out loud, inspecting his palms. “Never done a proper day's work in your life.” Were you supposed to prick blisters, or leave them? He leaned the axe tidily against the wall of the shed, and wandered down through tangly rectangles crossed with thin paths that the estate agent had assured him were the kitchen garden. One day, he supposed, he would have to get around to doing something with them. Should he hire a gardener? Did gardeners even exist any more? He thought of the imperturbable farmer, whose expression had never varied from the moment they'd first met, when he had personally witnessed the arrival and installation of the panther. (“Sorry,” the vet had said, as the men unloaded a snarling, rocking crate from the truck while the farmer stood and waited for the drive to be clear so he could get his tractor back out. “I knew that dose was light but you never like to overdo it when they're underweight.”

“Afternoon,” the farmer had said, nodding in Jack's direction. “Logs in the shed like you ordered.”

“Sorry about the racket,” Jack replied. “It's, well, to be perfectly honest with you, mate, it's a panther. Sorry.”

“Ah? Right you are then. You still needing that side of pork for tomorrow?”

Jack took his boots off and padded through the house, enjoying the small sounds of wood settling and pipes creaking. The thrill of owning such a vast, impractical space – to say nothing of the incredulous shock of having enough money to run it – still gave him a childish pleasure. And now there was the delight of knowing that somewhere in these grounds, these rooms, was Mathilda, reading or learning lines or trying out speeches or simply lounging, waiting to be discovered and unwrapped like a present. He could hear her voice in the library, a low sleepy murmur like bees. The door was open a crack. He glanced through.

Mathilda stood in the middle of the floor, looking back over her shoulder at Isaac, who sat nearly at her feet, close enough to touch her. Mathilda was naked.

“I suppose you're right,” said Mathilda, laughing. “But, you know - ”

Isaac shrugged. He was concentrating on the surprisingly large and clean sheet of paper on his lap. Jack noticed that he'd taken the full-size reproduction of
Birds of America
to rest on.

“The thing is,” said Mathilda, “most of the time, it's lovely.”

It was a terrible idea to listen. He listened anyway.

There was a pause, and a gesture from Isaac.

“I think he's just got this urge to help people,” she said, as if Isaac has spoken. “You know that girl, that crazy girl who keeps writing to him, what's her name? Evie, that's it. She got fired from her job, so he said she could stay with him. She thought he was asking her to move in.”

Another pause, and a low, dirty chuckle from Mathilda.

“Yes, but that's just Jack, isn't it? For someone so fuckable he's really quite lacking in self-awareness.”

Was that a compliment? He took a savage chunk out of his thumbnail.

“I know, I should be more grateful. A huge country house, a man who worships me. The classic fairy tale. All we need
now are some enormous hairy dogs and a couple of over-privileged children.”

He knew what Isaac was asking her. He himself had never dared.

“Oh, I don't know maybe one day.” She sounded impatient. “There's so much I want to do first.”

Isaac put his hands on her thighs and gently turned her towards him. Jack, still standing silently behind the door, glimpsed her thick thatch of pubic hair as she moved. Was that why Isaac had turned her around? So that he could stare at her? There? He was close enough to kiss -

Stop it
, Jack thought.
Go outside and chop things
. But the command had no power.

“Oh, the usual.” Mathilda laughed. “Travel the world. Play every great part. Be famous. But I'll settle for making a living.”

Isaac glanced around the library.

“I don't want it all on a plate,” Mathilda said. “Life's no good served up in bite-sized portions. You have to go out into the wild and hunt it down - savage it with your teeth.” She pushed her hair back from her forehead. “But I do love him, Isaac. I really do. I'm just afraid of what's going to happen. I want his time and his energy and his support, and his ideas, and his inspiration, and for him to read every part I play and talk to me about it, and to admire my work, but from a position of knowledge. And there's all the other things I want that have nothing to do with him like success, and the chance to pick the parts I want to play, and space to grow, and time to myself. I want so much – so
much
– and I don't know if he's strong enough. He'd be better off with Evie. All she wants is to look after him.” Abandoning her pose, she sat beside him on the floor and rested her chin on her knees.