A Stone's Throw (21 page)

‘Always a first time,’ he’d said.

A strand of cobweb drifted to and fro in Cassie’s window, and his thoughts drifted with it. He thought how hard it was, being a good father, especially now, now that Cassie was this age, and he fell into remembering, different scenes, different times, and before he could stop himself, the remembering took him somewhere else and he was over the edge, his stomach lurching, head over feet over mind.

They’d made such a good show of it at first. They were a beautiful couple, to themselves most of all. He went to university and Barbara found work in London. They spent time together: parties, films, weekends, trips home occasionally. They had sex. Though that was when it was hardest, when he most needed not to think; and he often wondered what it could be like for her. She seemed to enjoy it and he was always gentle, but really he didn’t know, and he never asked. Asking would have been too risky. You got your fingers burnt for asking. And what about for him? For him, the sex was shadow play, pretending. He never longed for it. He never felt that insatiability, that hunger that he’d known for Ben. But they
loved each other, and they made each other laugh; that was good enough.

It was late in the summer he finished university that he took the train to Devon on his own for the weekend. As he walked up from the village, there was a golden, early evening light that made everything look possible. Sitting high up on the gatepost, Emma was waiting for him, her dress pulled in between her legs for decorum. She was brown from a summer outside, and had her hair cut short. With her gangly, teenage shape, she still looked more of a boy than a girl, except for the dress.

‘Mother thinks you’re a bringer of tidings,’ she said.

‘I have a message from Barbara,’ he said, ‘Which is: “Max Factor. Strawberry meringue.” That’s word for word.’

Emma punched the air.

‘She said you’d understand,’ Will said.

She jumped down, brushed off her dress and took his arm, striding to match his steps. Her arm seemed so light in his, and he envied her, standing there, so jaunty, on the edge of growing up.

‘Barbara’s too good for you,’ Emma said.

‘Says who?’

Emma shrugged.

‘They’re right, whoever said it,’ he said.

He found Meg, as ever, in the greenhouse. The air was rich and sweet. He sat, as he always had, in the old wicker chair and watched her swing the watering can. How often had he watched her like this? All his life, that he could remember.
He noticed, and this was for the first time, how measured, how slow her movements were, as if this – this tending to all that grew in here – were the only task she had in the world. The water flashed across beds of salad and cucumbers, and pots with tomatoes that shone like jewels. She had seen him, marked his presence with the slightest move of the head, and after a minute she spoke.

‘I know why you’re here,’ she said. ‘And she is a lovely girl.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She tilted the can and he waited.

‘As long as you’re sure,’ she said at last. ‘As long as you don’t find yourself wishing she was someone else. Something else.’

‘I don’t wish that,’ he said. ‘And I thought the news would make you glad.’

She put down the watering can.

‘I am glad,’ she said. ‘I am.’

But there was something in her voice he didn’t understand. He stood and walked over to her and when she turned, he saw that she was crying.

‘Mother?’ he said.

He felt a little boy again, to find her crying for something that he didn’t know about or understand.

‘Pay no attention,’ she said, and she wiped away her tears. Then: ‘I only worry that you are too like me,’ she said.

‘And that’s a bad thing?’

‘Sometimes one should act in spite of the world and his wife,’ and she smiled and put a hand to his hair, smoothed it with her fingers.

‘But if you’re sure, then I am glad for both of you,’ she said. ‘So go and find your father,’ she said. ‘You’ll make him proud.’

The next years were tumbled in Will’s mind like broken china: fragments with a snatch of colour or a half-design, though their sharp edges were smoother now. A life in London, work, marriage, friends, busyness. Days filled up, kept busy, so there was no time for being sad. It was true that he could still be caught by surprise: by the glance of light off the fountain water in Trafalgar Square, or a stray gull’s cry high above the streets, or the stretch of sky before him as he walked on a city heath. Without thinking, he’d put his fingers to his collar-bone and feel the scar scorched on there. It was a medallion, the measure of something; and he’d go on with a sense of sadness he wouldn’t name, but which he couldn’t, for a while, put away. Once he went with three friends, three other husbands, on a summer trip. They camped beside the River Wye and fished for salmon. The river was gorgeous, and the mood in the group was easy, relaxed. But Will didn’t enjoy it. It brought things too close and it was harder to be himself, sleeping close to the other men, and with the water, and the dying fish, and he turned the offer down when it came again.

The morning Cassie was born, the day was still so new, so early, that it seemed to Will he had the whole world to himself. His baby, his new baby girl, had been born in the small hours and now she filled up his mind’s eye. He’d left her sleeping in her sleeping mother’s arms and come out, euphoric, into a city that was still, incredibly, asleep. Once already he’d crossed the river and not even noticed, running
over Westminster Bridge as if he could take flight above the dozy pigeons, above the sleeping boats. He ran and ran and he saw only her dark, wet hair, her perfect ears, her fists like walnuts, her puckered mouth. Past Embankment tube station and up the steps, still running, and on to the grimy stretch of Hungerford Bridge, his spirits exhilarated, boundless.

Still he saw nothing except his baby’s perfect face and he ran on, coat tails flapping, until, halfway across, fatigue struck. His legs turned to lead, his lungs burned in his chest, and he was forced to a halt. Chest heaving, eyes blurred, he walked over to the rail; leaned on it, looked down. The sky was dawning grey, and the river was grey beneath, gagging and churning. Behind him, a train rumbled by. Between the air and the water Will stood and perhaps it was so much space, or it was the running; or perhaps it was hunger, because he hadn’t eaten much in the last twelve hours; or perhaps it was the new life he was responsible for, he didn’t know. But something overwhelmed him – dizziness, vertigo, terror – and he felt himself pulled beyond the edge, pulled into his fear, into the air, till he was reaching over and clinging on, staring down at the dirty Thames, repulsed and longing.

‘Hey, mate.’

There was a hand on his shoulder, and he started.

‘You all right?’

He was confused. His head felt blood-rushed and his fingers were fizzy and numb. He nodded, or he thought he did, and made to stand upright.

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ the voice said. ‘You look a bit ropey.’

He sounded young and male, and rough with something. Will felt his elbows grasped, then he was half-pulled, half-lifted away from the edge, and a hand steadied him on his feet.

‘There,’ the voice said.

Will turned. He was very young, more boy than man, and dressed in dirty jeans and an old anorak. He wore a battered rucksack with a bedroll slung below.

‘Thanks,’ Will said. ‘Got out of breath, dizzy.’

‘It’s fine,’ the boy said. ‘Sure.’

‘Could do with a cup of tea,’ Will said. He was cold, still shaky. He needed to sit down. ‘Anywhere round here you know of?’ because it was still very early, too early for most places.

‘There’s a place off The Cut’ll be open by now,’ the boy said.

He bought the boy a cup of tea and a full English, and watched him eat it in double quick time, eyes glancing up with every mouthful as if someone might take it off him. They didn’t talk. The boy was sleeping rough, but he had an appetite and Will thought that must be a good thing. Afterwards, as if they had discussed it, as if it were already understood, the boy took Will to a quiet alley, and Will fucked him.

He never told Barbara. Of course he didn’t, and anyway, he’d sworn it wouldn’t happen again. He had stood beside the hospital bed and looked down at his wife still sleeping, at his daughter, and sworn it. It was just because of the day it was, he told himself. His mind, his emotions out of kilter.

But he was wrong about that.

In that first year of Cassie’s life he marvelled at her single-mindedness, her sheer tenacity as she learned to crawl, and stand, and walk, and say ‘Dada’ and then ‘Mama’, and hold tiny things in her fingers. He marvelled at all the hard work there was in being a baby, and he clapped and cheered her, his gorgeous, round-faced diva daughter. But while Cassie thrived, his marriage died. The boy on the bridge had unlocked something in him, and soon he was living a second life that had its geography mapped out in secret places and borrowed times. Lunch hours, after work, sometimes even late at night he cruised. The sex was like a drug, each fix assuaging something for a time until the hunger came again. He told himself it did no damage. That the cruising was in one place, and his family in another. He told himself he loved his wife more fiercely for it. He told himself he could stop at any point. And he didn’t think about Benjamin; wouldn’t let himself. But when Barbara found him out and said to him: ‘Don’t lie to me,’ he wept, because it was the end between them.

Eventually he built a safe life for himself; an ordered, functioning life. He lived alone, he did his job, he had his friends, he saw his daughter and sometimes he cruised for sex. But each within its bounds. He was careful and he didn’t let things overlap. As the years built and Barbara remarried, Meg would ask him sometimes if there was anyone else in the picture, a woman perhaps. And sometimes he would make somebody up, a Catherine or an Alison, and take them on imaginary
dates; but mostly he would say that Cassie was the only girl for him.

Gradually Will’s head steadied. He knew what to do when things fell away; how to sit up slowly and make himself breathe, deep breaths in, and slow out, and haul himself back from the edge. Then stand, though his legs were like lead, and find the solid land. He had learned how to go out of the room and shut the door behind him again, and he did that now. But he still wondered where his father was. The father he would bury tomorrow. Because in all Will’s tumbling thoughts, he had been nowhere.

The day had gone to dark while he lay remembering. He stared at the windows in the flat. Outside it rained but he saw nothing but himself reflected back. His father was a man who believed that things were as they seemed. That clocks told the passage of time, and that clothes told the man. When Ben died, his father had sold the land he died on and the boat he died carrying, as if it were those things that had failed him, and not Will, and not Ben’s own bolt-struck heart.

Will went into the kitchen and cut the electricity to the green digits of the oven clock, then took out the batteries from the clock beside the bed. In the bathroom he turned the metal key against the grain, felt the cogs protest. He pulled out the winder on his watch so the hands were held just there. And last of all, he went into the sitting room.

He loved this room, its different geometries, its different objects: the long, angular sofas, the zig-zag pattern on the grey
rug runner, the tall, white blinds in the tall windows. In place of the hearth there was the stainless steel cylinder of a Pither stove, and on the walls he had mounted a series of African masks, their features flattened and elongated. Only one thing in here seemed anomalous. It was an eighteenth-century bracket clock that stood on four carved feet in a mahogany casing on the side table, and it had been a gift from his parents on his twenty-first birthday. Every seventh day Will wound it and in two minutes it would strike out the hour. But now he opened the case and stilled the pendulum with a soft hand.

‘No more time, Father,’ he said.

Then he got newspaper, tugging it urgently from the pile, and grabbed a whisky tumbler and the new bottle of Johnnie Walker, took them into the sitting room. He spread the newspaper over the floor, and fetched his shoes, half a dozen pairs, and the shoe-cleaning box from the bedroom. They were hand-stitched brogues and Oxfords; shoes his father approved of. Opening the bottle, he poured himself a glass and drank it straight down. He didn’t like whisky very much, but tonight it was what he needed and he poured a second.

George had given him this box years ago when Will got his first proper job. It was polished with brass hinges and a brass plate engraved with his name: William Garrowby. Inside were brushes, a shoehorn, soft cloths and tins of polish – tan, black, brown – each in its apportioned place.

‘Always look at a man’s shoes if you want to know what you’re dealing with,’ George had said. ‘It’s a good rule of thumb. And when you’re cleaning, watch out for the seams
and the crevices; that’s where the dirt gets in.’

Then George had poured them each a Johnnie Walker and lifted his glass to Will’s success.

Time and shiny shoes: his father’s bequest. Will ran his finger over his name and picked up the first shoe. Remembering calmed him and with his father’s voice in his mind, he cleaned as George had taught him, brushing in the polish, taking care with the eyeholes, and using a soft cloth to buff a deeper colour into the heel and the toe. Sometimes his tears dropped on to the leather uppers and he rubbed them in too. He cleaned and buffed till every shoe shone, and till he had drunk four fingers of the whisky. Then he put the shoes away and stood up. He was stiff from kneeling for so long and he felt heavy with sadness, or anger, or loneliness, he didn’t know which.

‘Clean shoes, Father,’ he said, and he laughed. ‘Fuck it. I never got it right.’

The funeral director gave each of them black gloves to wear. Pallbearers’ gloves.

‘They’re one-size,’ he said, which was for Emma who was the only woman. They were flimsy, cotton things and Will didn’t think they’d be proof against anything much. The funeral director told them to double-tie their shoelaces and to be careful where they put their feet because the aisle was uneven. They were to set the coffin down on the trolley at the front, then take their seats until the very end, when they would carry the coffin out again. Emma had the middle position on the left, behind him, and Henry was on the right. As
they lifted the coffin to their shoulders, he heard Emma gasp; just a small sound, maybe no more than an intake of breath as she shouldered her father. Slowly, carefully, they walked into the church. It was full and as he walked down the aisle, he felt the movement, like a soft wave, as people turned to watch. Head against the coffin he pictured his father, lying just the other side of the varnished wood, his brow close to Will’s, resting on its quilted pillow. Nearly close enough to kiss.