Mischief Acts, page 25
When Nik had told Richard, only on Monday, Richard had immediately thought of the tissues and wet wipes in the corners of the wood, and the nocturnal couplings that produced them. He’d wondered if that’s what Nik had been doing, all these years. Was it exciting, finding a stranger in the dark, or did longing just intensify until it overcame fear? But Nik was by then describing a man, who had a name, and who was meeting him at Clapham Junction on Thursday, for a proper date. Richard had smiled at this idea, of Nik at a restaurant, working his way through first-date questions with another man in a brand-new shirt. But he managed to make the smile convey happiness for his friend, rather than amusement. And he was genuinely happy for Nik, just a bit surprised. It made him rather proud, though, to be a confidant, and to be, it seemed, the only one.
The secret lives of his friends. He had examined his own life, for secrets, for excitement. What had he kept from Kate, over the years? The best he could come up with was that he’d never told her how the wood made him feel, how being there amongst the trees made something tight in his chest loosen, so that his eyes misted and his lungs let out a sigh. He’d never told her that living near a wood that was surrounded by fields rather than streets would have made him so much happier, because he knew she didn’t want that.
And now he has a new secret: the simple fact of his lying here, quiet and unseen, while Friday night peters out around him. One of the cats, a tabby with a freshly torn ear, pauses on its way through the wood to sniff Richard’s leg. There is a trace of mouse on his jeans, at the calf. The cat looks about, whiskers along Richard’s shin, but senses this is none of its business and turns towards home.
*
Kate wakes with a start. Empty bed. Rain is flicking through the open window on to the sill. What bed is Richard in? The same one as the night before? Someone else’s? Or a hotel bed, wrecked from sex, with someone else? Hell of a way to make a point.
She sits up, head thrumming. If he thought he had the moral high ground, being the lover not the loved, not getting the joke, he’s fallen so far he’s skulking somewhere on the ocean floor, right now.
Laura. She finds her watch on the floor by the bed. 10 a.m. She’s got five hours. Which means Richard’s got five hours too. To get home, to explain himself, to mollify her. To put everything back together before their darling is here.
All right, she’ll email him. Desperate, yes. But she can send an angry one, now. Two nights have earned her the right. But in the kitchen her laptop is already open on the table, and she remembers. She did it last night. She’d even checked her own husband’s Facebook page, like a forlorn teenager. Stared at photos from holidays a decade ago. Looking for clues. For love. Had she actually cried? There are tissues. Wine-stained ones.
Steel herself with coffee, before she checks what she wrote. Beside the machine the pot of squid is still out on the counter. Forgot to put it in the fridge. Richard’s squid. Ruined by her.
Check inbox first, delay the cringe. There’s a failure notice. Unable to deliver: inbox full. She could wring his neck. Making himself uncontactable like this. It’s so careless. Rude. Not even a call. But she knows why. He never bothered to memorise their numbers, thanks to that bloody iPhone.
Pull self together. It’s only been thirty-six hours. Which is nothing in the long haul of twenty-three years together, is it? Perhaps that’s what she wrote last night. A way to forgive.
Richard,
Your daughter will be arriving at 3 p.m. on Saturday. It would be nice to welcome her home together, don’t you think?
K
Phew. Except, there’s a PS. Which starts, My mother always used to say. Oh, God. She scrolls down.
PS. My mother always used to say, in every relationship there’s a lover, and a loved. I think you think the same as her, but it’s not true. We are both lovers. We might not be Romeo and Juliet, but unlike them we’re alive, so let’s make the best of it. I love you.
Romeo and Juliet? How could she be so basic? So schoolboy? But he didn’t get the email, thank the God of full inboxes. She had meant that PS to be meaningful, heartfelt. She did mean it, what she said. She’s not just the loved. Must figure out a better way of putting it. Prepare something she can say, when he gets back. She’s not got the energy, nor the will, now, to give him a hard time. Open arms. Forgiveness.
*
Richard’s jeans and shirt are soaked, and still raindrops patter on the denim, on the darkened green cotton stuck with darker leaves. He did this once before. He came into the wood, not through the garden gate but by the steps, down over the railway tunnel, in rain that had already begun when he was on the street. It had raised that fragrance from the warm ground that seems impossible on a hot, dry day: a steam of nature’s undergarments, a pungent kind of freshness that had made him gulp. Down at the bottom of the steps, he had hurried along the path through the wood to the small grassy clearing, and stood, letting the water hit and stream and drip. Then he lay down in the grass, and grinned up at the falling water, tasted it, felt it soak right through him, stitching him to the wet earth.
That feeling, being wet in the wet grass, being the wet grass. It had made him weep, for joy and for something stranger, a loss he could not name. When he’d got home, Kate had been bewildered by his soggy embrace, and by the earnestness with which he told her, I love you. He’d really meant it. He didn’t always, but in that moment then, dripping on the hall floorboards, he did.
Was it, in fact, some kind of closeness to nature that had done it, produced the feeling that could only be expressed through weeping? He is even closer to nature this second time, lying in the rain. His upturned ear is filled with water. It puddles at the small of his back, and in his left palm. Pressed against the earth, his belly has turned a greenish colour, under his green shirt, and this colour is seeping outwards, so his veins show like creeper tendrils under his skin.
Richard, the Green Man. Nik would find it funny. Drink enough beer there, he’d say, it’ll start to show, and he’d pat his mini-paunch. But Nik hasn’t been through this patch of the wood, so he hasn’t seen his friend. Richard is alone, greening in the rain, the earth softening to mud around his ribs so that he sinks, very slightly. Closer to nature.
*
She feels better fortified with a glass of the cook’s prerogative as she stirs the chicken. Rain is still streaming down the conservatory windows, hammering on the skylight. But look on the bright side. The upside. She has food, wine. Laura on her way. Richard, no doubt, on his way. A house, with, imminently, her family inside it. A hot gardener. She will joke with Tom next time, about the shopping. How foolish she felt, arriving like that with even more bags. How forgetful. The perils of midlife, again. God, no, not that. The whole situation is a cliché, and a funny one. Soon to be funny, when they are all here.
Quick sweep of the house before they get here, check Laura’s room has not silted up with drifting furniture again. From her daughter’s room she looks out at the sodden garden. The trees beyond the back fence are drooping, dripping. She hasn’t been in the wood for ages. Doesn’t like it that much. But Richard does. They could stroll this afternoon, if the sky clears. A family walk. Like when Laura was little. Tom’s pond dent is filling up. Another joke she can crack. Weather did the work for you! Ha bloody ha. Last time she was watching him from up here, she had a beer in her hand. She’s left the bottle in Richard’s study. Careless.
For some reason she pokes her head round the door this time before going in. His diary is open on July, where she left it. Three weeks of planning for her birthday, and it’s not even a big number this year. Taking precautions against rage? Or making sure that she, Kate, his wife, has the best possible birthday present, the best possible birthday, every year. She shouldn’t have offered Tom that beer. She shouldn’t have asked about flow.
The doorbell rings. Only 2.30 p.m. Her heart leaps. ‘Oh, shut up,’ she says out loud, but she can’t help it. Hope. He forgot his keys. He’s brought flowers.
‘Got a taxi!’ Laura looks so pleased with herself, standing there in her too-short shorts on the doorstep.
‘My girl. It’s you!’ she cries, and flings her arms around her laughing daughter.
The rain is still pouring from the sky, so that sitting in the conservatory is like being in an underwater bubble. Laura is doing her grown-up voice, draped on the wicker settee.
‘So, what are the facts,’ she says. ‘It’s been, what, not even two full days, yet. Nearly two days?’ She lifts her beer.
Two nights, Kate wants to say. She hadn’t meant to crack. But something about Laura being there, bounding through the house, her twanging sort of happiness, made her crumble. Just for a moment. She is composed, now. An officer reviewing the evidence. The junior officer.
‘And this has happened before,’ Laura says, carefully. Kate nods. ‘And he always comes back.’
‘Always.’
‘And he has his wallet, just not his phone.’
‘Yep.’
‘And he was really mad? Mum?’
She’s blinking. Blink faster. Try to breathe.
‘It’s obvious,’ Laura declares, sitting up straight, twisting her lovely long tangle of hair in her fist. ‘You had a fight a bit worse than usual. He did what he always does, but is just doing it a bit worse than usual. He’s punishing you. And he’s trying to be proportional. Proportionate. To his anger. Right?’
She nods. Her mouth won’t stay straight. ‘Right,’ she says, but it comes out like a terrible moan.
‘Mum, don’t be silly. Men are stupid. They don’t think things through.’
‘I thought you thought your father was perfect?’ She’s almost offended.
Laura shakes her head and gives a resigned smile. ‘Relationships are hard work,’ she says.
Where has this tone of world-weary wisdom come from? Not from her, disguiser of all marital fissures. And she keeps her own mother’s so-called wisdom, snarked directly into her mind, to herself. It would be sweet, but for the nightmare context.
‘So, let’s do the only sensible thing, and eat a ton of Brie, and get a bit drunk, and watch your favourite film, again.’
Oh, sweet daughter. Volunteering for a gazillionth viewing of Far from the Madding Crowd. ‘Bagsy Gabriel Oak, this time,’ she says.
‘Sergeant Troy is mine, for all time, and you know it.’ Laura takes her hand and pulls her up. ‘To the telly, and don’t spare the cheeses!’ she yells, and they run, skidding down the hall, not looking at the closed, silent front door.
*
The rain that kept the Saturday dog walkers from the wood has turned to drizzle now. The paths are deep with mud, and everything drips, an irregular constant patter, a beat that never settles. Richard’s green belly is bloated, pushing him up from the ground. He’s never had a paunch before. He’s managed to stay thin despite the desk work. But he’s no longer burdened by comparisons: his mean shoulders against Tom’s broad ones; his spindly thighs against Tom’s rugby legs.
All his worries have washed away. And he really had been worried, by what Kate said on Thursday night. All their married lives, he’d been surprised by how easy it was to be faithful. There’d been no seven-year itch, no midlife crisis, no empty nest syndrome when Laura outgrew them. It had been enough, for him, and it had appeared to be enough for Kate, so he had finally let himself take it for granted. They were safe, and he wouldn’t end up in a caravan in someone else’s back garden. He’d let go of twenty years’ worth of fear, that Kate would get bored with him, that being adored would stop being enough for her.
He did adore her. He’d just never been able to shake the feeling that it wasn’t mutual; that she endured, rather than adored. So, of course it had rattled him, this so-called joke of hers. And it had been hard to believe she hadn’t been thinking of Tom, when she said it.
But he never got the chance to figure it all out, with Nikesh, at the Green Man. And now Richard is the Green Man, hidden in the wood, as wet and dripping as the trees that lean over him, as quiet in his mind as every other dead thing that lies here with him, leaves and bird bones and last year’s forgotten acorns. Left to his own devices, he would eventually become part of the wood, and there’s a lot to be said for that. Stillness, green and brown, the slow, steady flow of oxygen.
*
By the time Bathsheba has married Sergeant Troy, they’ve finished the wine. On the sofa, Laura nudges her a bit too often, trying to coax out the quotes she usually cannot resist when she watches this film, the swooning sighs they’ve indulged in so many times that now they feel scheduled, expected.
‘Tell me again,’ Laura says, while they watch Troy walking out on his wife, ‘about the time at that party when you said your name was Bathsheba.’
‘Oh, but you’ve heard it before,’ she says. She is busy puzzling. Which of Bathsheba Everdene’s three suitors is Richard most like? He is not patient, sturdy Gabriel Oak. He is not Troy the irresistible cad. Is he jealous, humourless old Boldwood, then? Driven mad by her semi-imaginary lust for another? But Bathsheba doesn’t love Boldwood. And who would, the miserable old git. Could she try to think of Richard as steadfast Gabriel Oak? Would that help? Make her believe he’ll be back soon, he’s just been out tending a flock on a hill, relieving some sheep of colic or whatever it is in that scene where he deflates them all like balloons. He’ll be back soon, and this isn’t the beginning of a deep, dark phase, starting with the letter ‘D’ and ending in internet dating. The Liberty-coloured flat and the single armchair made life. That she hasn’t popped the balloon for the last time, and gone too far, ripped an unmendable hole.
But it’s Sergeant Troy who leaves Bathsheba. Gorgeous, charismatic Troy, with his pant-wetting eyes. And he does it by pretending to be dead. Clothes on the seashore. A Reginald Perrin for his times. She snorts. Imagine. Richard leaving a heap of clothes in the wood behind the fence. He’d sneak round to Tom’s caravan in his boxers. There to obtain advice on how to leave his wife.
‘What?’ Laura pokes her arm.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ she says. ‘Get your shoes.’
The air is still damp outside, and they tack along the wet pavement, sidestepping slugs that gleam in the orange light from the streetlamps.
‘Where are we going?’ Laura asks when Kate stops outside number 12. The house is dark. Just the faint blip of the alarm-system box showing above the door.
‘Remember Tom?’ she whispers.
‘Taciturn Tom?’
‘That caravan of his is through there, in the back garden. If your father’s been confiding in anyone, I reckon it’s him. He’ll know. Where he’s gone.’
Laura shakes her head. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea, Mum. He’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘Tom left his wife.’
‘So?’
‘I think, maybe, Richard’s been thinking about it. I want to know. If he said something.’
‘Fuck,’ says Laura. ‘How d’you know he’ll be in?’
‘I don’t.’
She leads Laura down the side passage, treading on several slugs in the dark. She can hear Laura’s eurgh, eurgh behind her. ‘Let me do the talking,’ she hisses when they reach the garden. The caravan is right down by the back fence, a white lump like a giant loaf of bread. No lights on, that she can see. The trees in the wood hiss beyond the fence, warning her off. Be purposeful. Don’t creep, in case someone’s watching from next door, and takes them for well-dressed burglars.
How can Tom live in this box, with its poky windows and child-sized door? There are curtains drawn all the way around, but as she edges along the back by the fence she sees a chink of pinkish light. Aim for that. Just check he’s there, before she has to bang on the door, alert the nosy neighbours.
‘Mum, look! A bat!’ Laura whispers behind her.
Her feet kick something over in the dark as she reaches the window. Wellington boots. She freezes.
But she can see a lamp, with a scarf thrown over it. The bed is pulled out, taking up half the space. And on the bed, Tom, entwined, with a girl. A Fitzgerald girl. Entangled. Naked. God, they are beautiful. Sleeping nymphs, the pair of them. His hand is splayed on her lovely belly and just the thumb is moving, slowly, back and forth. She remembers that weird comment Richard made, never mind which Fitzgerald girl Tom fancies. She jerks away.
‘Home,’ she mouths at Laura, pointing the way, in the dark. Before she weeps at her own foolishness, before she howls like a lost dog at the moon.
They get as far as the wisteria at number 18 before she lets it out. A wail, a howl, whatever it is turns into an ugly choking fit. She can’t get air in, air out, at the same time.
‘People will hear,’ Laura whispers.
‘I don’t care,’ she moans.
‘What’s the big deal?’
She looks up at the sky for help. Hysteria, under the wisteria. It’s so unfunny she nearly laughs. ‘Two secrets,’ she sobs. ‘Two whole secrets he’s kept from me. How many others are there?’
‘Only one way to find out. Mum?’ Laura is tugging at her arm. She lets her daughter haul her along the pavement like a drunk.
‘How?’
‘He can’t stay away forever, can he?’ Laura sounds irritated. ‘He hasn’t even got his phone. Or his laptop? And when he comes home, he’ll have to tell you. Whether you like what you hear or not.’
