by Sarah Winman
He finished his coffee and watched a group of American tourists look for C. S. Lewis’s grave. They’ll see the sign in a moment, he thought. He stood up, picked up his bag and veered through the graves to the spectacle of color the other side of the tree.
The daffodils were a mix of white and yellow, and he knew they were his father’s doing. A groundcover of forget-me-nots, too, not yet in bloom, the man was so bloody literal. He felt angry and he thought he shouldn’t be, the gesture was kind. His father loved Annie. The daughter I never had, that’s how he described her—his mouth always primed for cliché. Ellis found it hard to understand how flowers and care could reside equally in a man of such rage. Carol had tried to explain his father’s complexity to him when he was younger. Piss off, he’d told her, the one and only time. I deserved that, she’d said, and never tried again.
Guilty. That’s what he felt and that’s why he was angry. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been there. He sat down on the ground even though it was damp. He placed the pink roses in the central urn and they looked unseasonably forced, their heads small and tightly held, still in shock, he thought, after the refrigerated journey from Holland. Her name on the stone still drew disbelief and sadness.
He used to find comfort planting flowers she’d like. He remembered he even had a theme once, only red flowers or variants thereof, until he realized the muntjacs were partial to a diet of bright petals. But he came and that was the most important thing. He faced the stark landscape of headstones and it was real. He would listen to people at Lewis’s grave comment that he died on the same day as JFK, and they were right, he did. But Lewis’s death was lost to the world as the world mourned Kennedy because sometimes you look away and things change. And every month or so, bright wreaths would adorn new graves and he would acknowledge the grieving. A reminder that he and they were not alone.
But then memories began to drift beyond his reach and the panic set in. He’d call people up whatever the time of night.
What did Annie cook when you came to dinner? he’d asked.
Ellis—d’you know what time it is?
What did she cook?
The phone went dead. Over time, the friendships too. Only Carol stayed on the line.
Ell?
He could hear the muffled sound of her getting out of bed.
What is it, Ell?
Annie. She used to sing a song when she was cooking and I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what it was, Carol, and I need to know—
Frank Sinatra, Ell. “Fly Me to the Moon.”
“Fly Me to the Moon”!
She always went off-key in the middle—
Aw, she did, didn’t she?
She was quite awful really, if you don’t mind me saying.
Oh, she was.
D’you remember, Ell, when the six of us had dinner at the Italian place opposite Mabel’s?
Sort of.
Your father stuck to beer because he couldn’t pronounce the wine.
Ellis laughed.
I’m being naughty. Maybe it was your engagement dinner—
Yeah, I think it was.
You sat in the middle on one side. And—
Who was next to me?
Michael and Mabel. And me, your dad and Annie were opposite. They played a medley of Frank Sinatra songs. All the greats: “You Make Me Feel So Young.” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” “New York, New York”—that’s when you told everyone you were going there for your honeymoon. And then they played—
—“Fly Me to the Moon,” said Ellis. Annie stood up and she was drunk and she used the wine bottle as a microphone. And Michael joined her, didn’t he?
Oh, they were so happy, Ell. So daft and so happy.
* * *
• • •
ELLIS STOOD UP and brushed the dirt off his trousers. He picked up his shopping and was about to walk away but stopped. He took one of the roses from the urn and went over and placed it on Lewis’s grave. From my wife, he said, and he moved toward the churchyard gates.
He got off the bus at Gipsy Lane under a low sky suddenly threatening rain. The shopping bag was stretched taut and he wondered if it would split before he got it home. South Park was quiet and he could have gone for an early evening walk had it not been for the bag. He lifted it into his arms and picked up the pace.
He wasn’t sure, at first, what it was in his front garden, part hidden by a bush. But when he got to the gate, he said, Hello, bike! and looked about for someone to thank. He walked on to Hill Top Road, down Divinity, but saw no one. An act of kindness from a stranger. He knelt to check out the chain and gears. Slight scuffing to the edge of the tire, that’s all. He spun the front wheel and it rotated perfectly. He opened the front door and dropped the shopping bag on the table. He wheeled the bike into the hallway and left it at the bottom of the stairs. Later that evening, he brought it into the back room and placed it close to the fire.
* * *
• • •
DAYS WENT BY clearing the garden. Slow, one-handed work that quietened his mind and had him rising with intention. He ate breakfast outside, planning the day’s assault, the smell of early rain and mud curiously exhilarating.
Pruning shears he found in the garage. The floorboards were there too, stacked up against the wall at the side of the car. The smell of oak was sharp and fragrant still. He pulled a plank away from the pile and turned it sideways to see how straight it ran. He leaned his nose against the grain. The smell of wood excited him, always had. He could still lay the floor in the back room, he thought. He could get back to working with wood. He was good, he was skilled, they both said so. There are things I can do, he thought.
He brought a radio out to the garden and kept the volume low. He clipped away at the brambles inches at a time and collected the cuttings in an old compost bag as he went along. Jamie leaned across the fence and asked if he needed any help. Ellis thanked him and said no, but later Jamie brought him out a mug of strong tea and a plate of biscuits, and he crept under the fence and sat on the bench with him and they talked about rugby.
The stiffness in his wrist and elbow stopped him putting in a full day’s work and come the afternoon he walked what he called the tourist trail into town. Over The Plain and Magdalen Bridge, he cut through Rose Lane into the meadows and smoked a cigarette leaning against a storm-felled tree. Students jogged by and tourists dreamed, and as he got closer to the Thames, he had a sudden desire to be on the other side.
He crossed Folly Bridge, and the University boathouses shone golden in the last rays of the afternoon. The London train departing in the distance, geese, the slap of oars against water. These were timeless, familiar sounds to him.
He was drawn inexorably to the dark shadow of undergrowth that was once Long Bridges bathing place, his and Michael’s place, an ownership that extended well into adulthood. It had been closed these last years and he was surprised how quickly nature had advanced. Still attached to the concrete sides were the steps leading into the water but at the back the toilets were now roofless and filled with rubbish. It was hard to imagine they’d once called this place the Beach, but they had.
That first summer of their friendship, when the temperature nudged above seventy, they cycled down and squeezed themselves in between bodies on the grass. They sunbathed with arms behind their heads, and cooled off in the Thames’s seductive flow. He remembered how Michael had bragged that he could swim, but he couldn’t. He said that he’d read everything about swimming, firmly believing he could trip across words, like stepping-stones, to the bank of experience. But he couldn’t. It would take another summer before Michael would learn to swim. But he floated, though. Facedown in the river with his arms and legs out wide, and people watched, and sometimes their laughter turned to panic when they saw little sign of movement. Dead man’s float, he called it: a survival pos
ition after a long, exhausting journey.
And when the afternoon set down its long shadows, back on their bikes they got, still wet, still dopey, and with shirttails flapping, they dried out on the saddle in the breeze back to Mabel’s. Summer’s end they were sinewy and brown, and took up a little more space. Summer’s end, they were inseparable.
Ellis looked up. Geese had taken flight toward Iffley and he watched their formation until they disappeared behind the trees. Dusk was creeping up fast and the ponds had turned black and the lowering sun gave way to a deceptive chill. He did up his jacket, stamped back across the damp grass to the bridge and towpath. At the dark edges, puddles shimmered as if starting to freeze and the flues from canal boats smoked generously. Up ahead, rock music blared out from the upper room of a boathouse. A solitary young man on a rowing machine kept stroke to the beat of the music. He was shirtless, his muscles distinct in the artificial light. Ellis stopped. He felt Michael’s presence next to him, could almost smell him, the pronounced vagaries of longing. And he wanted to talk to him about the years they were apart because he hadn’t during the months when he returned. Or those moments from youth, when they raced back to an empty room and nervously explored the other’s body in a pact of undefined togetherness that would later bring him equal shame, equal joy. And those nine eventful days in France and the plans they made then—he’d let them go without acknowledgment, as if they’d never existed, or never been important to him and he never understood why. He had tried to talk to Annie once. She had asked him why he was so angry. She asked him things women ask men, things he wasn’t able to talk about and he didn’t know how to explain, not his confusion nor his discomfort. But he remembered her eyes were soft and open to him and they said, you can tell me anything, and he could have, he knew that even then. But he didn’t. And now here he was, gazing at Beauty Rowing in the Darkness, as dog walkers passed by and students mistook his gaze for desire. All of it was important, he wanted to say. You were important to me, he wanted to say.
They used to come along here as men, often just the two of them. Annie said they needed time together, she always tried to give them time, especially after they were married. She was the one who sensed things had changed, the one who knew Michael was keeping secrets from them. When did you last see him? she’d ask. About three weeks ago, he’d say.
Jesus, Ell, you’ve got to do better with people.
He remembered how Michael and he walked the towpath to the ponds one particular day, and when they got there, they both agreed so much had changed. It was only March, but there was a quiet desolation to the place. Opportunistic flashers came down there now to wank. That’s what Michael said, his grin-sneer lighting up his face. Ellis, however, remembered the desolation more a reflection of their mood.
That was when Michael told him he was leaving Oxford. Ellis said, When? And Michael said, Soon. And he said, Where are you going? And Michael said, Not far. Just London. But you’ll come back? Of course I will, said Michael. Every weekend. How could I not?
And he did come back. Every weekend. Until Mabel died, and then he didn’t. He disappeared into the millions of others who walked those crowded London streets, and Ellis never knew why. He and Annie had an address, at first, somewhere in Soho. But no matter what they sent out the bird came back with nothing between its beak.
We have to stop this, said Annie one night. Go and find him.
No, he said. Fuck him.
And that was that. A six-year standoff of wasted time. His absence unbalanced them both in a way neither could have predicted. Without Michael’s energy and view of the world they became the settled married couple both had feared becoming. They made little demand of one another and conversation gave way to silence, albeit comfortable and familiar. Ellis withdrew, he knew he did. His hurt turned to anger, there when he woke up and before he slept. Life was not as fun without Michael. Life was not as colorful without him. Life was not life without him. If only Ellis could have told him that then maybe he would have returned.
Five years they existed in this unfamiliar interlude, until teenagers—bizarrely—prodded Ellis back to life. He was in a café watching a group of them at a nearby table. They were loud and comfortably draped across one another and he enjoyed their gauche attempts at cool, at their more charming traits of silliness. But it was their curiosity and attentiveness that left an impression on him, the natural interplay of their delight. And he wrote down on a scrap of paper what he observed about them, the qualities, the playfulness too, things he thought he’d relinquished in his relationship. He felt so grateful to them afterward that he went to the counter and quietly paid for them to have another round of coffee and cake.
Outside, as he passed the window, he saw their confusion and laughter as a laden tray was placed in front of them.
He went straightaway to a travel agency and got out the scrap of paper and asked for suggestions of a trip within three hours’ flight of London. Included in this trip, however, had to be—and he read out loud—Delight. Wonder. Curiosity. Culture. Romance. Seduction.
That’s easy, said the travel agent.
And a month later, they were in Venice.
The sudden impulse had them holding hands again across tables and leaping onto vaporetti that had already pulled away. And they holed up in a small hotel and breathed in the lagoon’s old breath, and in the quiet corner of an osteria or sprawled across a bed with the thump of orgasm ripe in their throats, they found one another again.
One morning, they woke up to the flood siren and it was an eerie sound in the early hour. They got up and went outside. A skein of mist hung over the lagoon, the rising sun fiery and red and beautiful. The duckboards were out and they walked around dazed and took breakfast at the Rialto market, just a bun, but then they dared one another to have a glass of wine instead of an espresso, and it was perfect. And they walked. Siphoning information from passing tourist groups, resting against bridges in full sun, finding brief respite against the cold air, the soft slap of waves the city’s musical pulse.
Spaghetti vongole was lunch, a dish that was a favorite, and they drank more wine and Ellis read out notes from a well-thumbed copy of Venice for Pleasure. Let’s go back to the hotel, said Annie, smiling. In a bit, said Ellis. But there’s a place we have to go to first, and he paid the bill and took her hand and they shared a slow amble toward San Rocco and into Tintoretto’s beating heart.
In the Scuola Grande, they stood in awe as the Bible took shape and form above them and beside them. The beauty, the anguish of humanity startled them and silenced them. On the upper floor, Annie sat down on a chair and cried.
What is it? asked Ellis.
Everything, she said. This and having wine for breakfast and you and me and it’s just everything. It’s us. Knowing that we’re OK and we can be silly too. He taught us silly, didn’t he?
Ellis smiled. He did.
And I love you and we don’t have to settle, do we?
We don’t, he said.
And I do think of him still, you know, because I just want to know we’re still important to him. I’m being selfish, I know. And Ellis said, I think about him too. And she kissed him and said, I know you do. We just love him, don’t we?
They went back to the hotel and slept in Venetian dusk. They woke in the same position and opened their eyes to the sound of glasses clinking in the bar below. They went downstairs and sat at a table by the window. The cold sulked along the calli and gondoliers sang for tourists. A fire was lit in the hearth behind them and they held hands across the table and talked nonstop about unimportant things, and they laughed well together and they were the last to leave the bar. They undressed but didn’t wash. They turned off the light and slept with their arms around one another. They said good-bye to a city reflected in a billion corrugations of water.
Three weeks later, Michael did come back to them as if he’d heard their lament across the
sea. He walked in the same way he had walked out, with little explanation and that daft grin across his face. And, for a while, they became them again.
* * *
• • •
MUSIC FROM NEXT DOOR started early and it was loud. Ellis looked out onto their garden and saw three dustbins being filled with ice. It was bound to be an all-nighter, he thought, and he felt nervous. Christ, what the hell was he doing? Jamie had invited him earlier, tagged onto the end of an apology. Said something like, we’re having a party tonight, Ellis. Sorry in advance for the noise. You’re welcome to come if you want.
He stared at his limited array of clothes. Keep it simple, Annie would have said. Jeans, old Converse, light blue shirt. Socks or no socks? He looked at his ankles. Socks, he decided. He stepped back from the mirror, and ran his fingers through his hair. He hoped there’d be no dancing because then he’d have to leave.
The champagne had been in the fridge for a year or two, bought on a whim to elevate his mood, but he hadn’t been able to face it because he never drank champagne alone, so it sat at the back of the fridge with a dark jar of pickled onions, which he had been afraid to open. He grabbed the bottle and walked out the back door. He squeezed through the hole in the bottom fence. He didn’t know why he did that, he could have gone round to the front and rung the bell like any other normal person. He’d become feral and reclusive.
He found Jamie in the kitchen, and Jamie cheered when he saw him and said something like, Look who’s here, folks! This is Ellis, everyone—All right, Ellis? Hi, Ellis. Nice to meet you, mate, etc. etc. The music was quite loud and Ellis had trouble understanding what people were saying to him. He smiled a lot and opened the champagne and moved back out to the garden with his new friends. He asked Jamie what the music was and he told him it was Radiohead, the song “High and Dry.” He rarely listened to music anymore but he liked this music and thought he might even buy this music. Who is it again? he asked.
