Amherst (27 page)

“Am I that insignificant in your life?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I don’t believe you.”

He gives a shrug that says, Believe what you want.

“You wanted to see if you could make someone happy,” she says. “And you did make someone happy. And that someone was me.”

“And now I have to pay for it.”

“Am I asking you for anything?”

“How do I know? You’re here. I didn’t invite you. You must want something.”

“Well, for a start, I want you not to kill yourself.”

“Why? What use am I to you?”

“You made me happy.”

“And now it’s over.”

“Don’t you get it, Nick? We’re all in this thing. We have to support each other. Why can’t you leave me with a sweet memory
of a lovely man who made me feel great about myself, even if only for a week?”

“I’m to go on living so you can have a warm feeling?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, at least you’re not telling me it’s for my own good.”

“No, it’s all entirely selfish. I’ve only thought of myself from start to finish.”

He has the grace to smile at this.

“What we had was just a bit of fun, Nick.” She’s lying but it’s necessary. “I’m really only here because we never said good-bye. Not properly.”

“You’re here to say good-bye?”

“You know how it is. Every story has to have a happy ending.”

“What would a happy ending look like?”

“I’m not sure. But there has to be a kiss.”

He smiles at that too. And as he smiles she sees again the frightened child that lives within him. What is it that’s made him so afraid?

“When you go home,” he says, “what will you tell Laura?”

“Does it matter?”

“No, not really. It’s just that I’m not all that proud of what I’ve become. I used to be better.”

“How long ago is it?” she says.

“Thirty years. More.”

“Long time.”

“Long time.”

“I’ll tell Laura,” says Alice, “that we had some good times together.”

Then they’re both silent. What’s he doing, hiding in the woods? This lovely man with so much to give.

“Your friend with the mustache told me you have a favorite spot in the woods,” she says. “A hilltop with a view.”

“That’s right.”

“How about you show it to me, before it gets too dark.”

“It’s a bit of a climb.”

“How long?”

“Fifteen minutes, maybe.”

“Let’s do it. Then I’ll go.”

She wants to get him outside, into the twilight. Then they can talk without seeing each other’s face.

“You promise you’ll go?” he says.

“Are you scared I’ll move in with you?”

“It has happened.”

“Not with your plumbing.”

So he puts on an oilcloth trapper hat, and Alice buttons up her coat, and they set off. There’s a trail running through the trees behind the cabin, up the flank of the hill. They walk in single file, Nick in front, and for a while they don’t talk. It’s very dark in the trees.

“So what’s the idea, living out here?” says Alice at last. “Apart from killing yourself, that is.”

“Out here,” he says, “I have no phone, no Internet, no newspapers. I don’t even have a mirror in the cabin. I’ve stripped out all the distractions I can. I bring food with me, enough for a month. Then I settle in and talk to no one. Then after a few days, a week maybe, I start to feel like I’m standing on solid ground again. I’ve got away from the unreality.”

They’re pounding steadily up the trail as he speaks. Alice listens. She wants him to do the talking.

“You’re writing this love story. We all want to hear about love.
But love isn’t the big thing we make of it. It’s just another part of the unreality. It’s a mug’s game. We can’t win. We think there’s someone out there who can make us happy, someone who’ll make us complete, but that’s not how it works. We think not getting what we want is the problem, but it’s the wanting that’s the problem. We want the whole world to feed us. Everything has to be fodder for the great open mouth. And this self we’re feeding, it’s insatiable. We can’t satisfy it. There’s no end to its hunger. We end up as slaves, chained to our hunger, doomed to service its bottomless need forever. There’s only one way out of that. You have to break the chain. You have to cut the self loose, let it go. That’s when real life begins.”

So there it is: the Gospel according to Nick.

“You know what I feel most of the time?” he says. “I feel disgust. I feel sick with unreality. I feel sick with self. So I come out here.”

He comes to a stop, breathing heavily. The hill has become steep. Alice says nothing, but she does understand. She thinks she does.

I, just myself, and because it is I.
Was Mabel sick with self?

Now the trail opens out, the trees fall away, and they’re on the summit. From here a great view reaches in all directions. Dun farmland and tinted forest beneath a dusk sky. They stand getting back their breath, breathing in the distance.

“What is it about views?” says Alice.

“It’s a big world. A good view makes us feel small.”

“Why should we want to feel small?”

“Because we are.”

She gazes out over the land towards the faint light on the western horizon.

“Your friend thought this is where you’d come to die.”

“Could be.”

“How would you do it?”

“It’s not complicated. You take the pills. You go to sleep.”

“But how exactly? Would you bring a flask of water? Would you sit down?”

“I suppose so.”

“Where?”

Nick looks round. He points to the one pine that stands on the hilltop.

“Back against the tree. Looking west.”

“Go on, then. Sit down.”

He gets what she’s doing now. Shoots her a wry look from under the flap of his stupid trapper’s hat.

“Where have I heard this line before?”

“Come on. Sit down. Back against the tree.”

He shakes his head, but he does as he’s told.

“Now open the tin. Get out your flask. Put the pills in your mouth, two at a time.”

“You’ve thought about this.”

“Lot of pills to get through. You have to make sure they do the job. Swallow them down.”

He makes some token hand movements, miming taking pills, to show willing.

“Now wait for the drug to take effect. Will it hurt?”

“Shouldn’t do.”

“So now you’re getting sleepy. This is it, Nick. Sun’s gone down, night’s coming. All your troubles will soon be over. You’re really cutting the self loose now. You’ll be free soon. Free forever.”

He gazes up at her, amused, full of admiration.

“You Dickinsons.”

“Shut your eyes.”

He does as he’s told.

She claps her hands. The sound startles birds from the trees. His eyes open.

“That’s it,” she says. “Game over. Life goes on.”

“What do we do now?”

“We go back down the hill.”

He rises to his feet, shaking his head.

“You Dickinsons,” he says again.

He leads the way back into the darkness of the trees. Back down the track. Below she can see the glow of lamplight from the cabin window. Soon they’ll get to the cabin, and her car. Soon she’ll be driving south, and it’ll be over.

I can’t come all this way and not say it.

“After you left,” she says, “I went a little bit crazy. We’d had a good time, and suddenly you were gone, and I couldn’t take it. For at least twelve hours I convinced myself I couldn’t live without you. Stupid, isn’t it?”

“We did have a good time,” he says.

“But I’m not in love with you,” she says. “It’s not love.”

“Of course it’s love,” he says.

There’s the cabin before them now, smoke climbing from its chimney. There’s the car.

She says, “I want you to promise me something.”

“What’s that?”

“If you ever take those pills for real, I want a letter.”

“I wouldn’t know where to send it.”

“I’ll text you my address.”

She’s by the car now. Time to go. Don’t string it out.

“So I did make you happy?” he says, wanting to be convinced.

“Yes, Nick.”

“There has to be a kiss.”

He takes her in his arms and they kiss. His stubble scratches her cheek.

“Bye,” he says. “Again.”

“Bye, Nick.”

All the way back, driving from Vermont into Massachusetts, into the night, she doesn’t think of him at all. She doesn’t think anything.

22

The road out of Lewes passes under the brow of Mount Caburn, over Glynde Reach, over the railway line from Eastbourne, down to the Edenfield roundabout. Driving herself to Jack’s home in her mother’s car, Alice slips back in time and she’s a child again, on her way down this same road to school. She feels again the scratch of her school kilt on her bare thigh, and the dread in the pit of her stomach. She hears her mother cursing the slow-moving traffic under her breath. She herself wants the journey never to end.

Those pitiful partings.

“In you go, darling. Just one more kiss, then.”

The feel of her mother’s arms round her. The terror of the embrace coming to an end. The chill of being on her own.

Dear God, was it really so bad? A small country prep school run by kindly teachers. And yet printed deep in her physical memory is this sensation of stark fear.

She turns off the main road at the roundabout, and the ghosts of school hide their faces. Here, entering the village of Edenfield
down the Newhaven road, she meets other memories, inherited memories, passed on by her grandmother, the one who now lives in France. This is the village where her grandmother grew up, in the very house to which she’s now driving. Just one of the many cords in the net of time and place that hold Alice so tight: Jack’s family home was once her grandmother Pamela’s home.

Newly returned from Massachusetts, lovelorn and jet-lagged, Alice is in a fragile condition. Today is Saturday. On Monday morning she’ll be back at her desk in Mortimer Street making up for the last two weeks. For two days only she can be her mother’s little girl again, and put off the reckoning with adult life.

She turns right at the village shop, down the narrow lane past the line of council houses, past the field where they hold the village fete, and onto the unpaved track that leads to River Farm. She parks in the yard by the barn. From inside the barn come banging noises and the occasional grunt.

Jack is not home. He’s gone into Lewes on some errand, promising to be back in time for Alice, but he’s not back.

Laura, his mother, says, “It gives us a chance to gossip about Nick Crocker.”

Laura is still beautiful, now in her fifties. She leans against the Aga in the kitchen, waiting for a kettle to boil to make them tea, strands of loose blond hair falling across her face.

“Is he still breaking hearts?” she says.

“All the time,” says Alice.

“Even though he’s got a wife.”

“They’re getting a divorce.”

“Poor old Nick. So what’s he doing these days?”

Alice is on the point of saying, He’s been thinking of killing
himself. But Nick so wanted Laura to think well of him. It’s a small-enough parting gift.

So she says, “He’s taken himself off to live in a cabin in the woods.”

“A cabin in the woods.” Laura busies herself making tea. “Not so romantic when you’re over fifty.”

Henry, Jack’s father, appears looking red in the face.

“In case anyone calls,” he says, “I’m in the barn chopping logs for kindling. Oh, hello, Alice.”

“All right, darling,” says Laura.

“But no one will call.”

He goes again.

“I don’t know whether to be sorry for him or to say it serves him right,” says Laura. “Nick, I mean. Not Henry.”

“He says he’s trying to cut the self loose.”

“Oh, really. He doesn’t sound as if he’s changed at all. You know, for years I thought he was a bastard, but secretly I rather admired him for dumping me. Then he showed up here, and I realized he wasn’t a bastard at all. Just . . . well, lost.”

“I think he has changed,” says Alice. “Maybe he has. Actually, I wouldn’t know.”

She becomes confused and realizes she’s blushing. Laura gives her a quick look.

“Don’t tell me he had a go at you.”

Alice says nothing, which is admission enough.

“You have to give him his due,” says Laura. “He doesn’t give up.”

“I’m embarrassed,” says Alice.

“Don’t be,” says Laura. “I’ve been there.”

She pours them both a cup of tea, and shakes out a packet of
caramel chocolate digestives onto a plate, and they sit down at the kitchen table like a couple of teenagers.

“He used to be impossibly attractive,” says Laura.

“He still is,” says Alice.

“Has he looked after himself? I mean, he hasn’t got all flabby, has he?”

“No,” says Alice. “Not at all.”

“He had such a beautiful body. Oh God, I’m talking over thirty years ago now.”

“He’s still in good shape.”

“And can he—” She breaks off, laughing. “Listen to me!”

“He has strings of girlfriends,” says Alice. “All younger than me.”

“Oh, honestly! When’s he going to grow up?”

“You know,” says Alice, “when I first met him I thought all of that, but I still wanted him to want me. What’s wrong with me?”

“We’re all the same,” says Laura. “Henry says it comes down to status. We want the men that other women want.”

“But it’s not just that. Please don’t tell anyone I said this”—she means don’t tell Jack—“but for a day or two I was really crazy about him. Real full-on passion.”

“Me too,” says Laura. “For a lot longer.”

“Does Henry mind about Nick?”

“Oh, Henry knows Nick’s no threat. Even though I was never passionate about Henry the way I was about Nick. I was fond of Henry, and I felt safe with him. I knew he was in love with me, or thought he was. So there wasn’t really any need for me to be in love with him. But guess what? With every year that’s gone by, I’ve loved him more.”

Alice thinks of the red-faced balding man chopping wood in the barn, and feels touched.

“But don’t you miss the passion?” she says.

“Passion’s all about anxiety, isn’t it?” says Laura. “With Nick, I was never sure of him. He never told me he loved me. I never felt worthy of him. I expected him to leave me every day. And one day he did.”