Past (19 page)

In the middle of the night a noise intruded into Jill's dream and dispersed it. She was sorry, because the dream had been intricate and delicious – tidal, like swimming in shallow warm water through fronds of weed. She assumed at first that she had been woken by one of the children calling. Then the noise came again, thudding against her window-pane, a slushy blow, insolent and insistent: some bird must be bruising itself against the glass, on a crazy mission to get inside. Her first thought was to get up and close the window, which was open six inches or so at the bottom. Jill had been brought up to sleep with her window open, even on the coldest nights.

The front garden was stark with moonlight. There was no wind, and yet the young silver birch seemed to be quivering in agitation; some big animal was rooting round its base. When the animal straightened up she saw that it was a man – it was Tom, in his bulky duffel coat with the hood up. He had been gouging up another handful of earth and stones from around the base of the tree to throw at her window: luckily her parents slept at the back of the house. Furious, she pushed up the window and leaned out, feeling the cold air on her bare shoulders. She was wearing the pink nylon nightdress he had bought for her last birthday – not out of any sentimental attachment, but because it was the only one she'd had clean to bring with her.

— What do you think you're doing? she hissed.

He dropped his handful of earth and came to stand below her, brushing off his hands, turning the pale oval of his face up to her, framed monkishly in its hood. — Come down.

— I don't want you here, go away.

— For god's sake, Jilly, come down and talk to me.

Truly, in that moment she wasn't gratified – even though he'd come all this way just to find her. All her exasperation, which might have been waning, revived at the actual sight of Tom. Of course she couldn't really send him away, though she longed to do it; there was nowhere for him to go from here, in the middle of the night. And she was afraid of his making more noise, waking up her parents, confirming their suspicion that in choosing Tom she had made drastic errors of judgement and taste. She told him to wait, she would come down; then she closed the window and stood in her bedroom at a loss, not knowing what to do with him. This room, where she had slept alone all through her childhood and girlhood, appeared in that moment virginal and sacrosanct – even though she'd spent any number of nights in it with Tom since they'd been married, when they'd come visiting together. But her marriage seemed to her now a flimsy, provisional thing, and the spell of her solitude had grown powerful again. Every nerve was strained in her, against his intrusion.

Pulling her nightdress over her head, she dressed hastily in the clothes she'd taken off the night before, putting on an extra jumper, and then on top of that her coat. Another handful of gravelly soil came thumping against the glass, and she remembered that Tom had no patience: even when his dinner was almost ready he couldn't stop himself sometimes from devouring two or three slices of bread, thickly buttered, spoiling his appetite: his wide eyes would be pleading with her apologetically even while his mouth was still full. Quickly Jill made her way downstairs with her shoes in her hand, then went through the kitchen and let herself out by the side door, unlocking it and closing it quietly behind her, slipping into her shoes and making her way round to the front garden. The sky was a vivid blue, so bright it seemed to stand back from the land in amazement; the swollen moon fumed with light above Brodys' broken old slate roof, which was a sheet of pure silver. She couldn't see Tom at first, then he reappeared loping round the far side of the house. She supposed he'd been looking for a way in at the back. He was a big man, six foot two or three and fourteen stone, but he walked hunching his shoulders like a teenager, with his hands in his pockets, rolling stiffly from the hips.

— Thank Christ, he said. — I'm fucking freezing, Jill. Let me inside.

The duffel coat had its animal smell, like a wet old dog; it must have rained at some point on his journey. Jill snapped at him in an undertone not to swear, not here – seized in a gust of rage she swung her hand at him, slapping him hard across the face, although the hood's hairy fabric deflected the worst of her blow. She had never hit him before and he was astonished, though comically obedient, keeping his outrage subdued. Really, he might have bellowed. — What's that for?

She could tell he was flooded with self-pity.

— I didn't want you to come here. I didn't ask you.

All this conversation was carried on in a barking whisper, while Jill took Tom by the arm and steered him away from the house, down the garden path. He said plaintively that he'd come because her mother phoned: he'd thought something must have happened to her, or to one of the kids. — I've hitched all the way, it's taken me all night, there was nothing on the roads, it rained. I had to walk the last few miles, from West Huish. And I got lost, I went the wrong way.

— My mother didn't phone, she scoffed. — You've forgotten, we don't even have a telephone!

— Well, she did, she spoke to Carol. Who was at Bernie's, as it happened: I'll explain later what's going down with those two, it's pretty complicated.

Jill thought then that Sophy must have gone through her pockets.

— So that really was Bernie's number?

— Of course it really was Bernie's number, he said indignantly. — All the time I was on the road, I was so anxious, worrying about all of you: now when I've got here you treat me like a pariah. And I'm hungry, I've had nothing to eat since I set out, I've got no money.

Knowing he would be hungry, she had brought out a packet of chocolate mini rolls from the kitchen. Struggling with the foil wrapper in the dark, Tom wolfed down the first roll in a couple of mouthfuls, spitting out bits of foil. — Can't I just come inside? he urged her through chocolate crumbs. — Jilly, we have to talk. This is getting ridiculous. Just because of one stupid mistake.

— Give me a mini roll. I'm hungry too. You woke me out of my sleep.

— I'm not sure if I can spare you one. I'm famished – and these aren't very filling. But go on then. Look: see how much I love you? What's mine is yours. Disregard that it was yours in the first place.

Jill ate her roll in smaller, thoughtful bites. — If you want to talk to me, we have to walk. I know somewhere we can go. I'm not letting you inside the house; I don't want my parents to know you're here.

He said resignedly that he didn't mind walking. When they opened the front gate, the lane was so pale in the moonlight, between looming dark walls of hedge, that they felt as if they were stepping down into water. They went on whispering, even when they were surely out of earshot of the house. Tom asked over his second mini roll whether she'd told her parents about you-know-what, about Vanda.

— I haven't. I'm too ashamed to tell them.

— Ashamed of me?

— Of myself, that I married anyone capable of anything so dismally ordinary as an affair with his secretary.

— She wasn't my secretary. I don't have a secretary.

— Someone else's secretary then. Talk about second-rate.

Tom gave a low, swooping whistle of mock admiration. — Ten days at home and you really are back to being the vicar's daughter.

She swung round to slap him across the face again and this time he was ready for her, he caught both her wrists easily in his big hands, laughing. — Come on, you have to admit, that did have something of your old man in it. Something of the pulpit.

Jill stopped struggling then and stood very still, with her shoulders slumped inside her thick woollen coat and her head bowed, as if some burden were falling on her out of the dark, some awareness of futility. Tom wasn't stupid, he didn't mistake this for submission to him. He put his arm around her carefully and they began to walk again, more slowly. When they were out of the moonlight they had to slow down anyway, because they couldn't see the road surface. After a while she was leaning into him, letting him take some of her weight, in a way that felt familiar to her and even comforting, though she complained that his coat smelled awful and scratched her face.

— Listen to me, Tom said. — I'm telling you about Paris. A revolution is happening in Paris. The children are tearing down the prison walls. Everything that seemed established and set in stone turns out to be insubstantial as fog.

— Did you write all that in one of your articles?

He said that all the students were asking for was an education – a real one. In the Sorbonne the discussion groups were packed out, day and night. Everyone had their copy of the Little Red Book. Did she know that only eight per cent of the university students in France were working class? The Renault workers came to teach the students about factory work, they told their life stories. It was beautiful. The atmosphere was electric. All the time, everyone was listening to the news on their transistors, even the bourgeois, taking them out in the street so as not to miss anything: not the government channels, but Luxembourg or Europe I. — We had dinner in the
quartier
the other night, and when we came out there was a wall of flame across the street, we had to tie handkerchiefs across our faces for the tear gas. The police are brutes, they beat up the wounded even when they're laid out on stretchers, they beat up the doctors. There's rubbish everywhere, no rubbish collection. And burned-out cars. And you were right about the trees. It's sad about the trees. But they will plant new trees.

They struck off from the lane into the path through the woods; Jill had brought a torch in her coat pocket. What if it was true? she thought. What if this absolute, creative transformation into a new life really were possible, and it was her fault that she couldn't see it, and was stuck inside the old one?

— Journalism's beginning to disgust me, Tom said. — It's just being part of the machine. I'm thinking about taking up my painting again. I've got some ideas. Doing something real for once. Something that's really different, part of how everything's changing.

She took him to the Goods' cottage, and they went inside. It was darker and colder in there than outside in the woods. — We could stop here for a bit, Jill said. — If you really want to talk.

— What is this place? Who lives here? Won't they mind? It smells creepy.

— He died and she went off her head. It belongs to no one.

Their voices were flattened in the stale, tiny room; Tom shone the torch around, picking out torn-out coupons stuffed in front of the plates in a dresser, a crocheted antimacassar, Jesus gazing yearningly at them, a wilted magazine –
The People's Friend –
in a wire rack, a dirty crust of sliced bread in a torn plastic bag on the floor. Invisible in the dark aftermath of the torch beam, the room's sparse furniture was more insistently present. Jill had brought matches and she tried to make a fire in the grate – there was kindling in a bucket, she brought in a couple of logs from the pile outside. But the chimney didn't draw well and it smoked. Tom went exploring upstairs and came down with an armful of eiderdowns and blankets. — It's grim up there, he said. — I had a feeling he'd died in that very bed, whoever he was.

The musty damp eiderdowns and the wood smoke made him wheeze, he had to use the pink rubber ephedrine pump he always carried with him. They spread the eiderdowns on the floor and wrapped themselves in the blankets, then ate the last of the mini rolls; it turned out that Tom had the remains of a quarter bottle of brandy with him too, although he'd said he had no money. Generously, he let Jill have most of what was left in it. Shuffling out of the blankets on her hands and knees, she adjusted the logs in the fire, adding another one – she had a gift for fires and this one had settled in, it wasn't smoking too badly. While she crouched there on all fours, taking her weight on her arms with her face to the flames, Tom tugged out the elastic band from her ponytail so that her hair fell down loose over her shoulders. Then he slid his hand against her neck underneath it, making a low noise all the time as if he were growling in delight, bending his head down to kiss the back of her ears. At the same time he was sliding his other hand up between her legs from behind, slithering against the hard nylon of her tights, pushing up her skirt out of the way, probing around the waistband of her knickers. Closing her eyes, Jill shifted her weight so that she was pressing back against his hand. She thought then that this was really what she had been wanting all along, it was what she had come for. The wheezing in Tom's chest was as purposeful as a ship's engine.

— I missed you, Tom said. — I missed you so badly, Jilly.

Jill wouldn't have been able to stop herself going along with the lovemaking, if Tom hadn't spoken. The spell of this strange place in the middle of the woods, where neither of them were themselves, was very powerful – she was half abandoned to it already. But then she heard such familiar confident satisfaction in Tom's voice. He was so sure that this would make everything all right. In one bound she sprang away from him, pulling down her skirt: she was still on all fours, but now she was facing him. They were head to head, like two fighting dogs. — How can you? How can you just settle back into this, as if nothing had happened?

— I'm not settling back into anything.

— Yes you are! When you say you want to talk, this is what you mean.

— Don't be a prude, he said. — Don't tell me you don't want it too.

— You've got such a coarse mind. I don't just mean sex. I don't mean sex all the time.

— I know you don't, he coaxed her. — Neither do I. But this is still all about Vanda, isn't it? I never thought you'd be so hung up on that old possessiveness. I thought we agreed we didn't own each other.

— You haven't even asked about the children.