The Crossing, page 12
Three or four times a day the phone rings. A message from her mother saying the important thing is to eat nutritious food. A call from the police wanting to speak with Tim. A call from Arnie who, when the call was made, was clearly on his way to being drunk. He will come to her, he says, at a moment’s notice. Whatever she needs, anything at all, anything. And later, a second call, when he is fully drunk, saying there is obviously no God, that there are things she should know about, that she can call him in the middle of the night, it’s not as if he’s sleeping anyway and for God’s sake she mustn’t do anything stupid, mustn’t, I don’t know . . . Are we in control of our lives? Obviously not. And what then?
These messages from Arnie are the first she pays close attention to. A shout that carries above the noise of a shouting crowd. The unexpected value of incoherence.
The oil man comes. He whistles. He fills up the tank. He says it’s usually her husband he sees. He says, ‘We could all use a little sunshine, eh?’
One evening, walking in the lane, she sees an owl flying along the road in front of her. She assumes it’s an owl. A large pale bird, silent and suddenly swerving into the dark of a field.
She thinks, as she walks home, she’s about to come on. She’s very regular, a day or two either way. In the downstairs toilet of the cottage she looks in her pants, touches herself. There’s nothing. Nothing the next day or the next or the one after.
A visit from Slad. He has, he says, been asked to collect the picture, the little watercolour of the girl in the straw hat with the basket of cherries. He doesn’t say why they want it back; it may have something to do with the insurance. He lifts it off its hook and puts it into a cloth bag he takes from one of his pockets. The bag is like those used to keep a pair of expensive shoes in, or that is pulled over the head of a man about to be hanged. He asks Maud if she wants him to take the hook out of the wall but she says he can leave it. There is nothing brusque or unfriendly in his behaviour. He spends a lot of his time around horses and his movements are measured, predictable.
At last the kitchen is properly warm. She sits at the table in lamplight drinking a glass of water. The night is wild and the wind is knocking a window somewhere upstairs, a window she should probably go up and secure.
There are flowers in the sink, white chrysanthemums she found on the doorstep with a card (Deepest Sympathy) signed by the neighbours, Sarah and Michael. White chrysanthemums, some greenery, cellophane, thin green ribbon. People know. All over the place people know. It may even be in the parish magazine. It doesn’t matter. It’s all right.
On the worktop between the bread bin and the toaster the child monitor is sitting in its base beside the plug socket. A red light shows that it’s on, a green light that it’s connected to the unit upstairs, that it’s receiving. Sound is played through a speaker; it is also registered in a rippling fan of lights on the face of the monitor. She sips her water and watches the lights, the way they leap forward until almost the entire face is lit up then drop back for a moment before pulsing into life again. She watches. She drinks her water. She slowly drains the glass.
When she goes back to work the first person she sees is Kurt Henderson. Perhaps no one told him she was coming back. In his stare there is deep discomfort, a profound unreadiness. He says, hoarsely, ‘I’m so sorry.’ After a pause, he adds, ‘Yeah.’ He holds out the papers in his arms to indicate work, and shoulders his way into Meeting Room 2. If you will tell me why the Fen appears impassable . . .
She spends twenty minutes with the woman from Human Resources. It’s agreed she will, for the time being, work a four-day week, that she will drop the Kappa-opioids project which is, anyway, pretty much running itself these days. She asks Maud how she is coping, how she and Tim are coping. She knows Maud well enough now not to expect much in return, much beyond some vague assurance, and when it comes she nods and smiles and says, ‘Good, good.’ She makes no mention of how Maud has been remembered in her prayers or how, at the church in Reading city centre where four or five services are held each Sunday, where there are bands and young faces wet with tears and the minister in jeans and a T-shirt struts the stage like a successful comedian, she has had Maud’s name read out, thrown like a rose to the fluttering hands of the faithful.
Sweet Jesus Lord lay your healing hands on this woman!
Day two at work and she drives down to Croydon. There’s a seminar, the latest in a series about the reporting of side-effects, a topic they can never quite get free of and that is starting to worry the team in Orlando. The assumption is that Fennidinel epibatidine is acting on the receptors for the chemical acetylcholine, but it‘s unclear what else it may be interacting with, what else is stimulated, released. On a screen they look at colour slides of positron emission brain scans. On one of these—image twelve, middle-aged female—there is a shadow shaped like a bird in flight.
During the coffee break a man strides over to Maud, leans over her and says, ‘I hope Fenniman’s aren’t playing games with us. I hope they’re serious about seeing this through. It would be a bloody disgrace if they don’t see it through . . .’
He is interrupted, tapped on the elbow by a woman, a colleague, and later, when he’s been told, he is quiet, will not look at Maud, turns a pen through his fingers.
Mid-December: cold air descending from high latitudes. In the morning she scrapes ice off the windscreen then leaves the engine running while she goes in to make coffee. The kitchen is not untidy. She does not let the dishes pile up, does not forget now and then to sweep the floor. It is not untidy but it is different, like a ring no one wears any more or a path no one walks on, no one but her. She checks in her bag to see she has what she will need for the day. She looks, for perhaps a full minute, at the monitor on the worktop. One morning (ice on the tips of the grass, on the rosehips, on the stumps of cut maize, the steel bars of field gates) she passes a car that has come off the road, ridden up a bank and wedged itself in the hedgerow. She slows and sees a man standing beside the car with a scarf tied round his head. He’s like a man from the year 1200. He grimaces, calls something she does not catch, waves her on.
It is at the end of this season, this three weeks of tumbling air that is written about in the newspapers, that she comes home to the cottage and finds the front door open. It’s been dark for hours, no moon, no lights in the house. She calls then goes in and works her way through the house, visits almost every room. In the spare room she sees the guitar cupboard is open and empty. She goes downstairs. Someone is knocking on the door, a gentle but persistent knocking. It’s the neighbours, Michael and Sarah. Michael has a torch. They are both wearing dark blue or black fleeces.
‘Is everything all right?’ asks Michael.
‘We were very worried,’ says Sarah.
‘We didn’t know what to do,’ says Michael. ‘We wanted to call someone but we didn’t know who. We thought of calling the fire brigade.’
They wait, and when they see she has no idea what they are talking about, they begin to tell her, passing the story back and forth between them.
They had been off work for two days, the vomiting virus everybody has. At about half past three—they know the time because they were watching a programme on the television and it finishes at half past—they heard a car and a car door and looked out in time to see Tim going into the cottage. He was using a single crutch, he was on his own. They didn’t think anything of it, not really, but then, from their kitchen window, they saw him go into the garden. He had a guitar with him and that did seem odd because it was cold and already starting to get dark and why would he want to go and play in the cold? But instead of playing he put the guitar on the grass and went back to the house and a few minutes later came out with another guitar, put that on the grass beside the first and went back to the house again. They had no idea what he was doing but they began to be anxious. Three or four guitars—and they knew he had good guitars, very good and very expensive—all just lying on the grass. The rest of it happened very quickly. He poured something on them, lit a match. It was like an explosion. It was an explosion. At first the flames were as tall as he was and he staggered back and nearly fell. Then he just stood there, watching until the fire was almost burnt out. Afterwards he went back into the house and a minute or two after that they heard the car again.
‘We’re not unsympathetic,’ says Michael. ‘We’re just worried.’
‘We’re worried about fire,’ says Sarah.
‘The fire brigade,’ says Michael, ‘cannot be here in less than twenty minutes. More like half an hour.’
Maud has never heard them speak so much. They had seemed to be people of few words, people who moved about their lives almost silently. Now she sees this impression was wrong. They are full of words, words that were waiting for something to happen that would release them. She thanks them and closes the door. There’s a torch on the kitchen windowsill. She turns it on and goes out to the passage between the kitchen and the oil tank. The back garden is small. A parcel of land with vegetable beds at the bottom, a low red-brick wall separating it from the neighbours’ garden, a beech hedge on the lane side. The fire, what’s left of it, is on the lawn close to the swing. There are embers still, a residual heat, the smell of an accelerant. She squats with the torch and lifts out the head of one of the guitars, wipes it with her thumb, sees the strutted inlay of diamonds and moons, feels how the wood is warm as a hand, then lays it back with the rest, the ashes, the heat-tangled wires, the blackened nuts and little cogs, the debris.
In the house the answer phone is flashing. A message from Tim’s mother. ‘Is Tim there, Maud? Have you seen him? He’s taken one of the cars. It’s the automatic so he can drive it. Will you please get in touch immediately if you see him?’
Then another message, weary. ‘He’s back. Will you kindly call when you get this? I think we should at least have a talk. We need to start making some sense of things. We need to find some way to go on with our lives.’
5
She does not warn them she is coming. Or she does not warn herself that she is going. It’s a Saturday afternoon. She drives through patient country rain, parks in the courtyard. Dogs run out to greet her. They follow her through the rain to the door. There is an old stirrup bell here but no one ever rings it. She goes into the room with the waxed jackets, the cut-glass bowl with its shotgun cartridges. In the kitchen she finds Slad’s wife, a heavy woman dicing meat, a bone-handled knife in one hand, its blade as long as Maud’s forearm. She has never shown much friendliness to Maud, though Maud has never seen her show much friendliness to anyone other than Magnus, who treats her as a serf, a serf’s chattel. Mrs. Rathbone, she says, is lying down. Mr. Rathbone is in his workshop and won’t thank anyone for disturbing him.
‘And Tim?’
‘In his room,’ she says.
‘Upstairs?’
‘How could he manage stairs?’ says Mrs. Slad. ‘He’s in the little room. Off the music room.’
Maud thanks her. She does not say that he managed the stairs at the cottage, managed them all right and carried things down. She goes out of the kitchen, through the morning room and along a short windowless passage to the music room. Rain-light on a faded carpet, on the scuffed black of violin cases, the glass face of a tall-clock. On the piano, the photographs are arranged in tilted rows like a solar farm. Children kneeling by a Christmas tree. Children in their school uniforms, hair neatly parted. Children with dogs, children on the knees of their parents. There are, she knows, at least three generations of them there, children smiling for the camera, or caught between one stride and the next, one gesture and the next, arms flung out, hands and fingers blurring into air.
To the left of the piano is another door. Through it, softly, a woman’s voice.
She taps on the door and goes in. Tim is in bed, a single bed with wooden legs on casters, perhaps a child’s bed. Bella is on a chair beside the bed, a book in her hand. She is wearing a turtleneck dress of light grey cashmere, her hair scraped back and held with a clasp of muted silver.
‘Hello, Maud,’ she says. ‘Would you like to speak to Tim? He’s a bit drowsy, I’m afraid. A bad night last night.’
She too looks tired, a slight shadowing under her eyes as if, selflessly, she shares the burden of bad nights. She stands, puts the book on the chair, and with a quick smile at Tim she leaves the room.
In the bed, Tim has the covers pulled up to his throat. He is not looking at Maud. Perhaps he is not looking at anything. On the small round table under the window are various medicines. She can see that one of these, from its trade name, is a benzodiazepine. She could, if she chose, tell him the drug’s metabolizing enzymes. Could recite them to him like lines of poetry.
‘The neighbours were scared,’ she says. ‘They’re afraid you’ll set fire to the house.’
‘I thought about it,’ he says.
‘Did you burn them all?’ she asks.
He nods.
‘Even the Lacôte?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t burn anything else,’ she says.
‘What do you want?’ he says.
‘Are you staying here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not coming back to the cottage?’
He moves his head on the pillow, rolls it in a narrow arc.
‘Are you with Bella now?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Maud.’
‘What?’
‘Is that relevant? Who I’m with? Who you’re with? Is it relevant?’
He shuts his eyes. He looks very like his mother. The book on the chair is Vanity Fair, a paperback with a creased spine, a man and woman on the cover, dancing formally.
There are things she was going to tell him. Things whose relevance she thinks he would not question. Now she sees that if she tells him these things he will start to scream.
In the music room Bella is sitting on the piano stool looking as if it is only a kind of politeness that keeps her from playing.
‘Goodbye,’ she says.
‘Goodbye,’ says Maud.
* * *
When she returns to the kitchen Mrs. Slad has gone but Tim’s father is there, leaning against the sink, arms folded, apparently studying the toes of his shoes. He looks up. ‘Come through,’ he says, and leads her to what the family call the small drawing room. There is no one else there. At one end of the room is a sideboard too large for the room, its shelves filled with porcelain dogs and more pictures of children. In the grate is the remnant of a morning fire. Tim’s father leans down to it, prods it, then picks out from the wood basket a quarter log and lays it in the embers. All the wood comes from his own land.
‘A drink?’
‘No thanks.’
He goes to the table under the window, one of several about the house known as a ‘drinks table’. Into two heavy glasses he pours two measures of Scotch.
‘Never trust a man who doesn’t drink,’ he says. ‘Applies to women too, I think.’
He grins at her. She takes the glass, touches it to her lips, feels the small burn where her lips have cracked.
‘So you’ve been to see Tim.’
‘Yes.’
‘And how did you think he looked?’
She considers for a moment—the sallow face on the plumped-up pillow, the eyes that seemed, the moment before he shut them, to be pleading with her. ‘Tired,’ she says. ‘Sad.’
‘Sad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sad. Mmm. Well, yes, we’re all of us over here, Maud, a bit sad. You appear to be bearing up, however. I’m told you’re back at work. Got the old lab coat on again.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Good for you.’ He looks away from her. His face is flushed. When he speaks again it is with a voice that comes from somewhere much deeper inside of him, a voice he has been keeping hidden.
‘Tim is not sad, Maud. Tim is devastated. My wife is devastated. I am devastated. Even bloody Magnus is devastated. Only you, you and perhaps your extraordinary parents, seem to be managing.’
He empties his glass, carries it over to the drinks table. With his back to her he says, ‘I always rather admired you. The way you didn’t try too hard to make people like you. Most people do, don’t they?’
He pours another two fingers of Scotch into his glass, turns to her again. ‘We used, in the family, to talk about you quite a lot. Does that surprise you? Two schools of thought, really. One, that you were a bright girl, a bit shy, a bit gauche, a bit unworldly but basically all right. The other school, quite a big one, had you down as cold-blooded, entirely self-absorbed and not really all right at all. One thing that both schools were agreed upon was that you hadn’t the slightest interest in being a mother.’
‘That‘s not true.’
‘Oh, I think it is. I never saw the least evidence of any maternal instinct. I don’t mean you were cruel. That would have taken a measure of engagement, some effort of imagination. No, no. In your own rather pathetic way you tried. But something was missing. Something fundamental. You reached for it and it simply wasn’t there.’
He acts it out. The reaching, the clasping at air, the expression of open-mouthed surprise.
‘Why are you saying this?’ she asks.
‘We saw you, Maud. I saw you. Everyone did. It wasn’t difficult.’
He moves closer, close enough for her to smell his leathery aftershave, the whisky. He takes hold of her left hand, lifts her arm, slides up the sleeve of her sweater.
‘Look at it,’ he says. ‘Who would want this on themselves? I’m sorry, but there’s something very wrong with you and I wish to Christ Tim had never laid eyes on you. I wish none of us had.’
