Life (53 page)

Spence went back to the living room. He took a cigarette from the joint-makings box and lit it. Long time since he’d smoked a whole one of these. The box must be returned to its hiding place. Jake would be horrified if he knew that his parents used tobacco. They should give up, should smoke only grass, but secretly they were hooked on the little nicotine hit. Maybe Spence would die of lung cancer: yeah, soon. That would be a result.

He thought of Meret: of something profoundly intractable and devouring in the heart of his little Japanese wood-cut, something that Charles Craft could deal with maybe, but not Spence. Of the resistance, almost revulsion, he had felt for all female desire until Anna had made desire innocent. He thought of the rough, soft and rapid sighs that would be drawn from her in extremis; she was never a noisy lover. He would have been out of his fucking mind to try to climb into bed with her, though often they’d had blazing fights that had ended in sex, fights fueled by pent-up lust. But it was what he’d wanted, when he saw her so vulnerable. He still had a tingling half-erection, right now. Explain that to Anna Anaconda.

Yet there was still Meret. Explain that.

You reach the stage when every thought in your head sounds like a line from Chekov (we long since passed through the Solzhenitsyn phase). When there is nothing ahead but pointless toil and waiting for the grave, what is the sense in virtue or restraint or even self-preservation? He went on smoking: thinking of Jake, on that mountain in Slovakia last winter, crying from tiredness, refusing to be carried, he wanted to do it himself. And Spence’s heart had twisted inside him, because in that exhausted little face he knew that he was seeing the last, the very last of his baby son, gone forever, never to be seen again. Thinking of poor old Father Edmund at St Mary Magdalene’s, where the family attended the occasional Mass. All he hears about is pedophile priests and the evil deeds of the Vatican; but what is the guy to do, he just keeps on trucking, though he knows it’s all over. Soon this creed to which Spence was so irrationally attached would pass from the world in dishonor, just another soiled old religion…

I have fallen from grace.

He could have done better by Meret. He could have been a friend to her, she needed a friend, poor directionless kid. He hadn’t been able to resist that reverent touch on his sleeve. The way she looked up, expecting
everything
from him… He thought of the beach at Pasir Pancang, Boolean Algebra, Anna’s shining eyes. It seemed to him that he could hear, far off, the murmur of that tide, and see the ocean glimmering, calm and wide under a starless sky. But meaning changes, truth decays, and a sound knowledge of the Latin of the twenty-first century wasn’t going to help him now.

When Anna woke, the gulls on the rooftops were screaming, and rain was splattering against the bedroom windows. She was still dressed, her eyes were sticky, and her throat was sore. It was like some morning from the last weeks of the lab work, the terrible scraping out of final reserves of energy, eyelids that burned whenever she tried to close her eyes—all that effort; was it really over? Spence was there, looking at her.

“Where did you sleep?”

“On the couch next door.” He was subdued. “Jake’s in school. He doesn’t know anything, he managed to sleep through the firefight. Here’s your tea. Drink it; take a shower. Then I want you to come on a drive with me.” He grimaced. “Yeah, I know. You hate cars because they kill the countryside, it hurts you to make an unnecessary trip. But I’m still an American, just about. I think better when I’m driving.”

As they set out, he touched her hand. “What say? We put the hamster in the back, pick up Jake, and head for the ferry?”

She looked at him with incomprehension.

They drove up onto the New Forest freeway, where the ponies were standing heads-down into the rain; and somewhere back there, between the big road and the University of the Forest campus, Spence’s sun terrace lay under the icy wind: but whatever thinking Spence did, it didn’t come out in words. At length they came back down to the conurbation frontage, back to Bournemouth promenade. He found a parking space near to where Anna and Daz had once shared a room. They walked onto the pier. There was a thin crowd of visitors, old people, kids bunking off school. Young gulls, shrieking, skimmed the leaden waves.

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

“What do you mean? About what?”

“Please don’t take Jake away from me.”

“For God’s sake!” He sighed hard. “Anna, you’re over-reacting, outrageously. Can’t you see that?”

“I know.” She sniffed, and wiped her nose with her fingers. “I can’t help it. It’s because the way you feel for Meret can’t be…can’t be trivial. You wouldn’t start fooling around with someone I have to meet every day, just on a whim. This isn’t a fling, it’s something long term. I may as well start facing that, face the whole problem. My new life.”

“You always take things straight to extremes. You are still the woman I love, you and Jake are my family, and I don’t want anything to change, ever.”

“What about Meret? How does she feel? She made Charles marry her.”

“Shit.” Spence stared at the horizon. “Do you remember, a few months before this blew, you phoned me in the middle of the night, to tell me Jake was ill and you were going to take the day off, and stay home with him. So I didn’t have to rush back—”

“Yes, you and Meret were up for some award or other.”

He smiled. “It’s called the Carnegie. Well, we didn’t get it: probably never will now. A thing like Shere Khan gets one chance. I don’t care. She’s still the best thing I’ll ever do. The captain, I mean, not Meret. Anyway, that night when you called, Meret was with me in my room. We were snogging, for the first time, when the phone rang.”

“I must be psychic.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was being tactless. I thought I was being useful, telling you didn’t have to rush back. It wasn’t the middle of the night, it was ten o’clock, and I’d been trying your mobile all evening—”

“Whatever.”

“That day when I came to the Rectory. Had something happened then?”

He didn’t answer. Suddenly she knew that they had been here. The seafront was a place for Meret. You could take her on the funfair rides, you could win her an ugly oversized soft toy, you could buy her ridiculous food to eat. Meret would glow. She saw the two of them, standing at this rail. Meret looking up with that wistful smile. She would want to hold his hand, but Spence would withhold that privilege, considering it too risky.

She resolved to ask no more questions.

“When I went to fetch the hamster,” he said, “Meret asked me, when I went offline so fast the night before, was that because you had come in? You see, you’re not the only one who’s psychic. I told her yes, and that there’d be no more late night chat sessions, because you needed me. She got the message, and I haven’t spoken to her since. She’s afraid of you, you know.”

Psychic, thought Anna, staring at the sea. Yeah, or you could call it common sense… The banality of all this was so miserable, so unlike “Anna and Spence.” “Afraid of me?”

“She respects you, but you frighten her. Anna, please believe me.
It’s not serious.
”

“Then what is it?”

He looked away from her. “An addiction.” The gulls cried, the crowd passed by. “Maybe I’ve reached the point where most guys start out,” said Spence. “So low-down that I’d do anything for a free fuck and a momentary sense of achievement.”

They walked back to the car. Anna thought: I give up, she might as well have him. This ordinary-looking marriage, the Spence-and-Anna relationship, had been too strange, deep in its secret heart: too strange and too fragile for this world. The pact they had entered into was broken, and it could not be mended.

Spence fixed a secure hitching post on the wall outside their front door, something he’d been meaning to do for some time. The bikes moved outdoors. The bicycle stable, tidied out, became Anna’s study, so that she would have a place of her own to match Spence’s work room upstairs and would no longer have to mope in the loft. She spent her days in there, trying not to look at a large bouquet of lilies, roses, and carnations that stood on the table in the window bay: the expensive bouquet that said plainly
marriage on the rocks.

She pined for her refuge of dust and gloom; she didn’t like being down here, listening to imaginary noises. But she obediently stayed in her kennel, steeling herself for the years to come. Meret and Spence would get back together (if they’d ever broken up: she knew her husband was likely to be lying about everything; she’d picked up
that
much women’s lore). Anna would live with the situation, asking no questions. She’d thought about it, and as long as Spence was prepared to carry on, she preferred the old-fashioned solution. She did her best to behave normally, they had sex and it wasn’t so bad, it was okay. She told herself she would take the offensive, very soon. Defend her work, get her job back, be Anna again in this new world. She just needed to stay away from her husband’s room, which was where she felt Meret’s presence.

The reporters had gone, except for their faithful retainer in the maroon jeep. Spence said Anna was getting agoraphobic, so she went to fetch Jake from school. It was strange to be on the street, she felt otherworldly, as if she were convalescent after a long illness. The beggar-girl with the Golden Labrador and the two Lurcher puppies was in her regular pitch outside the corner supermarket, but the shop wasn’t the Happy Shopper anymore; it was something else. The Broken Down Blue shop, which used to fascinate Jake because you could see right through it into the back garden, was selling cheap underwear and stationery. Surely there was a lot less plate glass on their local shopping street than there used to be… She went walking on, forgetting she ought to be at the school gates. When did Khan’s the halal grocers go; when did the dry-cleaners close down? All these changes must have been going on behind her back or in plain view, but they didn’t register; change doesn’t register until it makes a difference (the Congregational chapel had become a pizza parlor), until suddenly one day some last insignificant item shifts and the whole street flips into a new state: suddenly this is not a local shopping street any more (the video hire shop was boarded up)… Anna began to tremble and tremble. It was like being struck down by malaria. She felt her forehead; it was cool. Agoraphobia, she thought. Oh fuck, oh damn, what a pathetic girlie complaint; is there no end to my shame?

She picked up Jake. “Sorry I’m late. I got distracted.”

“Everything okay?” he asked kindly.

“Yeah, why do you ask?”

“You and Daddy made it up?”

“What makes you think we’ve been fighting?”

“Oh, dirty looks.” He gave a distant, grown up shrug. “Shut doors. That sort of thing.”

“We’ve made up. Everything’s okay.”

They held hands, walking home. In profile, his face had already lost some of its childish sweetness. She saw the beaky nose, the adult mouth, starting to take shape. It would be Spence’s features that would emerge from the bloom. You killed my daughter, she thought, watching the boy child coldly. You murdered Lily Rose. Briefly, she wanted to kill him back. It didn’t seem a terrible idea, just the kind of thing that flashes through your mind sometimes.

In the middle of that night she sat up, bolt upright, electrified out of sleep.

She suddenly understood what had happened to her, the whole thing.