OUT OF THE BLUE a gripping novel of love lost and found (5 page)

‘Mmm,’ he says, puzzled by the flavours. ‘Is there cream in it?’

‘Low fat yoghurt. It’s good for the heart.’ She laughs, waving the spoon at him. ‘I want to make sure you live to a ripe old age!’

In the bathroom he runs his aching thumb under cold water, tilts his head to look in the mirror. Now that he is no longer a suited executive but a self-employed trader, his chin is allowed to have stubble and he delights in not shaving every day, even though Carmel calls him Mr Hedgehog. His hair is longer, unconditioned, wind-blown, its curl coming back. He has lost the processed, urbane image that used to
look back at him, has shed it like a skin, with the constricting colour-matched shirts and ties. His skin is rougher; he looks both younger and weathered. He feels a real person again, enjoys the solidity of his upper arms where the muscles have developed from lifting and carrying. As a family, they’ve taken a big gamble but it’s paid off. When he reads the papers these days, he sees dozens of articles about burned out professionals downsizing to achieve quality of life and he always points them out to Maeve; a bit of extra self-justification never hurts.

He stands in the shower, letting the hot water ease his muscles. It is the best feature of the house, strong and rushing, with four settings. He likes to start on moderate, then work up to full power. He reaches for soap, working it across his chest, resting his palm in the centre to feel his heartbeat. It is thudding dependably. ‘He had a heart scare,’ someone said about another stallholder who hadn’t appeared for a couple of weeks. He’d heard a woman in the pub describing her daughter’s miscarriage, saying ‘my heart is scalded.’ The heart, the heart; everything you put in your mouth now was judged by whether it was good for the heart. What is good for his heart, he wonders. Does his low-fat, low-cholesterol, polyunsaturated heart lie here, in this modern bungalow? It’s a long time since it has beaten fast, thudded with expectation and desire. When he was waiting to meet Liv it used to flutter and knock against his chest.

The soap smells of Maeve’s pale skin, of apricots and the moisturiser she uses. She is like a summer fruit, soft and pleasant. When he met her in his firm’s personnel department, typing up a contract for him, he liked what he came to think of as her refreshing, old-fashioned simplicity. She didn’t obviously weigh him up, play games about when they would meet, have a need to visit the latest clubs and bars. She liked to stay in mainly, have sofa suppers and watch films, relax in her deep cushions. Such domesticity was a relief after numerous flings with career women who always had schedules and deadlines, who liked late, exhaustingly prolonged restaurant dinners. Maeve obligingly fitted in with his schedules, accommodated her life to his like a shoe made to fit. Some of his male colleagues said they envied him, finding himself someone so pretty and uncomplicated; he became pleased with himself, thinking that he was a lucky and clever fellow. He realised how comforting Maeve would be to come home to and had reached a point in his life when the idea of comfort was as attractive as her ready smile and easy manner. Her astonishing, flattering conviction that he was an intellectual as well as a business high-flyer led him quickly and easily to the belief that she was The One.

The spray bombards his eyelids. He shakes his head, inhaling steam, feeling his lungs expand. Maeve is a good person, he can’t find a bad word to say about her. She has agreed to him giving up a highly paid job with an international company to sell fruit and vegetables, honey, eggs and jam on a market stall in a little country town. He can only do that, balance an unpredictable income because she works as a secretary at Riordan’s, bringing in the steadier wage. He knows that she regrets the life they had in Manchester and still hasn’t come to terms with the disruption he has caused. In her gaze, he sometimes sees disappointment, an unguarded yearning for the man he used to be, the one she proudly boasted about when she phoned her mother; sharply suited, high earning, smelling of aftershave, glowing with a corporate sheen. She has made the best of it all, she never complains; sometimes, he wishes she would, then he could fight his corner. She is a reliable woman. Her heart is constant and lies dependably in their home. He should be counting his blessings.

He turns the shower to the pulse setting. His mind is flooding with memories, scenes and images he hasn’t thought of for years. Liv used to sing to him when they took baths together, songs her mother was keen on from her days in amateur theatricals:
you are my heart’s delight and where you are, I long to
be. Or she would treat him to songs from the shows, musicals that her parents had taken her to over the years: ‘The Street Where You Live,’ ‘I Could Have Danced All Night,’ she knew all the words, the composers and original singers. The bathroom in her flat was damp and always chilly, the steaming water the only way of keeping warm. The old gas heater popped and gasped when they topped up the hot water, the flare of the pilot light hissing. He would pretend to count her freckles, her sun dust as he called them.

He shivers and squeezes his eyes, switching the shower to maximum, hoping the drumming water will drown his thoughts. Inside the thundering spray he sings, tentatively at first, then louder;

I have often walked down this street before,

But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before,

All at once am I several storeys high

Knowing I’m on the street where you live
.

As the cascade beats down on his head he laughs, eyes still tightly closed, seeing rushing stars and myriad lights, a pulsing galaxy of caramel freckles, that unforgettable tripping walk.

* * *

In the morning Liv wakes to bright sunlight and thinks of the well, smiling. She carries a mug of tea made with bottled water and the empty galvanized bucket along the little path made of stepping stones curving away to her right behind hawthorn bushes. The stones are worn and smooth with moss growing between the cracks. She follows them past the bushes and through a sea of swishing ferns, deep green and still licked with morning dew. She holds her hands out on either side and they tickle her palms, leaving traces like moist cobwebs on her skin.

The path leads her past oak and elder trees, via a dense tunnel of fuchsia and blackberries, then turns through a narrow gap and down worn steps into a grove encircled with more blackberries, fat-leaved rhododendrons and tall lilies. In the centre of the grove is a well, surrounded by more interleaved stones, built up in a couple of layers around it. A tall hazel tree throws dappled shade. The sun sparks on the stones, catching the surface of the water, illuminating tiny flies dandering above it. The blackberries are ripe and she picks and eats a handful, tipping them into her mouth. They taste of earthy red wines.

Kneeling on the ground, she lowers her face towards the water. It is deep and clear and fresh smelling, a natural spring. She plunges her hand in. It is earth cold, tingling. As a child she had imagined the fathomless source it came from and always it had filled her with a delicious fear. Kneeling by it, she would close her eyes and bend forward, thinking what it would be like to fall in and drift down through the chilled depths towards the earth’s raging core.

Her grandmother had treasured the well as an almost sacred place; provider of pure water but also of protection and healing. She would sprinkle the water over her aching shoulders and rub it against Liv’s throat to protect her from recurring tonsillitis. When Liv’s mother had shingles, Nanna had sent her a bottle of the water to dab on her abdomen but she had poured it into a plant pot, saying she preferred the doctor’s medicine to Juju. Always, Nanna carried a small bottle in her pocket, in case she felt unwell or sensed ill will or danger. It was an ancient well, she explained to Liv; it had been there long before the house. The hazel tree signified its special qualities because there was a hazel by the well at the centre of the world. This tree had dropped its berries into the water and to eat a hazel berry meant that you gained wisdom. All wells were linked to the central one and this meant that magic could occur at any of them. That was why the fairies often stopped by wells and had their meetings in the trees and bushes around them. ‘The people these days are full of science and brain work but there’s more wisdom in that water than in all the books in the world,’ she’d advised, as Liv’s mother threw her eyes up to the ceiling.

Liv scoops the well water into her mouth, shivering with the shock of its icy purity, then drinks and drinks with abandon until her mouth is numb, paralysed, and her face and hair drenched. She laughs, a loud, reckless note. A passer-by might mistake her for a fairy on the rampage, one of those her grandmother had often referred to. She’d had a wealth of verses and stories about them visiting wells and dairies; they were usually mischievous beings, out to hoodwink, irritate and tease, the delinquents of the spirit world. At night in the kitchen she would sing as she scraped leftovers into the pig bucket:

With tip-toe step and a beating heart quite softly I drew nigh,

There was mischief in his merry face

And a twinkle in his eye,

‘Twas Tic Toc Tic his hammer went upon a weenie shoe,

Oh I laughed to think of the purse of gold

But the fairy was laughing too.

Liv shakes her head back, sending a cloud of spray rattling into the bushes, then lies on her stomach, her arms propped on the stones, staring into the restless water. The sun and high clouds move across the surface, a constantly changing pattern of light and shade. She turns on to her back, shifting her shoulders to get comfortable and closes her eyes, the stones now acting as a pillow. The well sings quietly to itself, a constant, delicate melody. The ground is warming slowly under the sun. She can hear it breathing, stretching, stirring itself, releasing a loamy aroma. She dozes, the well murmuring behind her, little whispers of reassurance.

A cloud passing across the sun stirs her. She stretches, bones clicking, as if rediscovering their natural arrangement. Finishing her tea, she steps around the well to a hollow at the base of a furze bush and parts the grass to see if the stones are still there. They are small white chips of shingle specially collected by her father from the beach at Owenahincha on one of her parents’ wedding anniversaries. He’d used Liv’s plastic sandcastle bucket, a yellow one with moulded turrets to carry them back. That evening, she and her mother had watched as he’d levelled the ground by the furze and arranged the stones: MOLLIE AND FINTAN. Her mother had said it was the nicest gift she could have imagined. ‘Your daddy’s one of life’s real romantics,’ she’d said to Liv, holding her on her lap, making sure she blew her cigarette smoke away from her daughter’s eyes.

She traces her fingers along the stones, removing weeds. Once, she had asked her mother how much she loved her and her mother had said, ‘You know the well at Nanna’s? I love you deeper than the well and deeper than the deepest ocean.’ Standing by her mother’s coffin, she had understood suddenly, in a way that made her want to cry out, that a world was lost to her.

She rearranges the grass around the stones, restoring them to their hiding place. Then she fills the water bucket and makes her way back, her right arm dragging with the weight.

She crosses the paved area outside the kitchen and puts the bucket down by the door. There are terracotta tubs with flowers and herbs but they all look ragged and in need of attention. An archway through a trellis leads to the main vegetable plots. A spade is stuck in a ridge of upturned earth, leaning at a perilous angle. The soil is a dark, cocoa brown, the colour of the milky paste she’d mixed the previous night from a packet she’d found in the kitchen cupboard. A wheelbarrow half full of stones and shards stands next to the path, mulched leaves piled around it. She kicks through the leaves, gripping the spade and standing it up straight, slicing it deeper into the soil. The wooden shaft is warm and rough like dry skin.

Another trellis and archway takes her to an area of overgrown fruit bushes and semi-jungle, where the juicy grass is brushing her calves. Turning and looking back through the archways, she sees order being stealthily overtaken by confusion. She is no gardener but she knows, from a time long ago when her father had appendicitis, how quickly nature wrenches back control; his small garden became unruly within a month.

The path vanishes and she walks on through thick grass and bracken, her shoes becoming soaked until she reaches a low bank and steps with a stile crossing into a field with cows. She climbs to the top of the stile and catches her breath; even now, the vista can surprise. There, at the end of the sloping field is the glistening sea, reflecting the blue of the sky. From where she stands, she can believe the illusion that she could run down the field, straight into the waves. She holds her arms across her chest and stands, entranced.

As she watches the swelling tide, she thinks of the first time she and Douglas went on holiday together. They took a package trip to Cyprus to celebrate their engagement and he confessed to her, as they walked down to the beach in blazing heat, that he couldn’t swim. She had been astonished because to her, he’d had a privileged childhood, rooted securely in ‘old’ money; father a surgeon in the army, mother an ex-debutante — one of that breed who had been ‘presented’ to the Queen — who bred Labradors and had her own London property, a vast and gloomy mansion flat off Eaton Square. Douglas had been educated at Harrow and Oxford. Summers were spent in Switzerland and Gibraltar. The family home was a huge house in Sussex with acres of land, gardeners and domestic staff. He could ski, ride, play cricket, polo and golf but was frightened of being out of his depth in water. He’d informed Liv, in that mechanical voice he always used when speaking of his mother, that when he was two years old she’d thrown him into the sea off Brighton, just as she’d done to his siblings, to encourage him to swim. Unlike his brother and two sisters, he’d panicked and gone under, felt the water pressing on his skull, drank his fill of salt as he screamed. Afterwards, he’d developed a stammer that came and went until he was a teenager. Even then, telling her the story, it returned as a hesitancy, a pause between words and it occurred to her that he spoke in this way when he was in his mother’s company.