by Pat Barker
He took a deep breath, gripped the handlebars and pushed off, bumping down the hill, gathering speed, wobbling from side to side, afraid to steer because he knew if he changed direction he’d fall off. He had no hope of avoiding the pothole that swallowed his front wheel and sent him careering over the top of the handlebars. Sun and trees flashed, the world somersaulted, then shrank to an inch of tarmac level with his eyes.
Am I dead? Cautiously he moved his arms and legs and they seemed to be all right. He lifted his right hand to his face. The palm was scuffed and bleeding, the grazes coated in grit. That’s going to hurt. His bike lay, twisted, a few feet away, but as soon as he tried to lift his head to assess the damage he knew it was a mistake. Black spots drifted between him and the light. Trees and bushes rotated round his head and went on circling even after he lay back.
He heard Elinor call his name. ‘Nev, are you all right?’
He didn’t know. He required advance notice of that question. Running footsteps. Two heads bent down to peer at him.
‘What happened?’ Tarrant asked.
Bloody obvious what happened. No breath for stupid questions.
Elinor said, ‘Can you sit up?’
He tried again, but something was wrong with his head; the slightest movement made him feel sick.
‘Did you lose consciousness?’ Tarrant asked.
‘Don’t know.’ His voice was mouldy, like something kept in a cupboard for years.
‘Can you move your legs?’
Yes – though they didn’t seem to have much to do with him.
‘Look,’ Elinor said, ‘I’ll get the car. Dad’ll be home by now.’
‘No, I’ll go. I’ll be quicker. Help me get him to the side of the road.’
‘Should we move him?’
‘Can’t leave him in the middle of the road. We’re too close to the bend.’ Tarrant turned to Neville. ‘Do you think you can manage it?’
Somehow, with Tarrant supporting his head and shoulders, Neville shuffled to the side of the lane. The grass felt cool after the hot tar of the road. A smell of stagnant water rose from the ditch behind him. There was a whole succession of plops as frogs and toads leapt for cover.
They were talking together in low voices, Tarrant and Elinor. Like parents. He didn’t like that.
‘Are you feeling better?’ Elinor asked.
‘Yes.’ He made himself speak in a stronger voice. ‘But I don’t think I can ride the bike.’
‘You certainly can’t. You’ve buckled the front wheel.’ She turned to Tarrant. ‘You’re right, you’d better go. If Dad isn’t home, bring the trap.’
Tarrant ran down the hill, then, obviously revising his ideas of what constituted an emergency, slowed to a walk. They watched him mount his bicycle and pedal away.
‘He won’t be long.’
He could take for ever as far as Neville was concerned. Elinor was kneeling beside him. He caught her smell – peppery, intimate – as she bent over him. The dark circle of a nipple pressed against the white lawn of her blouse. He detected, or imagined he could detect, that bitter almond smell – or was it taste? You could never be sure. Some people couldn’t smell it at all.
‘If you took your jacket off I could bundle it up and put it under your head. The grass is damp.’
No, he didn’t think he could manage that. Instead she lifted his head on to her lap and he lay back, feeling a bit of a fraud. The first shock was wearing off. He’d stopped feeling sick and was beginning to suspect there was nothing much wrong with him, except for a large bump on his forehead and the skinned palms of his hands. Possibly he could have walked back. But this was better. Elinor had avoided being alone with him ever since he’d sent that letter, three weeks ago now, suggesting marriage. Well, now was his chance. ‘Elinor, you know what I said in my letter?’
He felt her thigh muscles tense. Her hand, which had been resting on the side of his face, was abruptly withdrawn. ‘Ye-es?’
‘Have you thought about it?’
‘No, not really. I can’t take it seriously.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t think you’ve thought it through.’
‘I have. No, listen.’ He tried to sit up, then, remembering her sympathy for his injuries was perhaps the only factor working in his favour, groaned and fell back again. ‘We have a lot in common.’
‘That’s why we’re friends.’
‘Two can live as cheaply as one.’
‘Doubtful.’
‘You’d be able to get away from your mother.’
‘I already have.’
‘We could share a studio.’
She was shaking her head. ‘It wouldn’t be like that. You’d have to get a job, or accept commissions you didn’t want, and I’d be in the kitchen cooking dinner and before we knew where we were there’d be babies crawling all over the floor.’
‘There doesn’t have to be.’
‘Anyway, that’s not the point, is it? I just don’t want to.’ She turned away from him. ‘All the good things we might have if we got married we’ve already got as friends, so why change?’
SEX, he wanted to shout, but of course he couldn’t. ‘I’m a man,’ he said, at last. ‘You can’t blame me for wanting more.’
‘I don’t. Blame you. But I don’t want more.’ She shook her head, defeated, as he was, by the lack of a shared vocabulary. ‘I don’t want that.’
He pressed, because he had to. ‘That?’
‘You know. Sexual intercourse.’
She made it sound like a weird practice allegedly indulged in by primitive tribes in the Amazon basin. ‘You only say that because you haven’t experienced it.’
‘I say it because I’ve never wanted to.’
‘If you’d only let me try.’
‘No, and it doesn’t matter how many times you ask, the answer’s always going to be the same. I’m happy as I am.’
‘Are you? I don’t think you are.’
‘All right then, I’m not.’ She started picking at her fingernails. ‘But I’m not going to pretend I feel something when I don’t.’
If only she’d let him try. He’d take care of her, he’d make sure there wasn’t a baby, and if she didn’t want marriage, all right, they’d have a different kind of relationship. And all the better, a sly, self-regarding voice inside him whispered. Was he really ready to forsake all others and cleave him only unto her? He wasn’t trying to fool her when he talked about marriage, but he sometimes thought he might be trying to fool himself.
Exasperated by the complexity of his feelings, he clasped her hand, only to release it with a cry of pain as the pressure forced grit deeper into his raw skin.
‘I think you’d better lie down,’ she said, dry, sensible.
‘I won’t give up,’ he said.
‘And I won’t change my mind.’
Neville closed his eyes and concentrated on feeling the warmth of her thighs through the nape of his neck. Somewhere close at hand a frog croaked.
Thirteen
Elinor escaped upstairs to her room for the last hour before dinner, leaving Paul and Kit talking to Father on the terrace. He’d brought a stack of newspapers back with him from London and they were deep in discussion about the European crisis, which seemed to be getting worse every day. Nobody bothered to mention Ireland any more.
Pouring water into the bowl, she splashed her face and neck. Behind the drawn curtains, the room was full of syrupy light. A floorboard creaked in the passage outside her door, but it was only the old house flexing its joints. Mother wouldn’t appear again till dinner. She’d been tired for as long as Elinor could remember, rousing herself to give instructions to the housekeeper after breakfast, then slowly sinking into intertia. Sometimes she got a headache and took to her bed for days at a time. ‘Be thankful you don’t suffer from migraines, my girl,’ she’d say on these occasions. ‘They’re a real problem.’ But to Elinor it had always been obvious that migraines were not a problem but a solut
ion. Generally one would strike whenever Father rang from London to say he wouldn’t be home for the weekend. In addition to his post at the London hospital he had a large private practice, and one set of patients or the other could usually be relied upon to supply a weekend emergency. Once, speaking to Toby, Elinor had referred to their parents’ separation and he’d gaped at her. That was how skilfully they’d managed it. Their own son didn’t know.
And against this background she was supposed to believe in marriage.
She pulled the curtain aside and saw Father and Paul talking on the terrace. The bumble and rumble of male voices reached her but only a few distinct words. Germany, Servia, Austria-Hungary Russia, mobilization, ultimatum, alliance, triple alliance – on and on it went. She was so bored with it.
Letting the curtain drop, she caught sight of herself in the dressing-table mirror and was startled by her fugitive expression.
I’m happy as I am.
Are you? I don’t think you are.
No, all right, I’m not. She hadn’t been happy for weeks. That night in the Café Royal, seeing the expression on Paul’s face as he stared at Teresa, she’d felt herself diminished. Neutered. Waiting for marriage was all very well, but suppose you didn’t intend to marry? What were you waiting for then?
Then worms shall try that long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
More to the point, what was she going to wear tonight? She had one evening dress left over from her pre-Slade past – white satin with a bow across the chest. Fetching it from the wardrobe, she held it up against herself. No, it reminded her too much of herself as a chubby, giggling teenager. There was nothing else, except her dark blue dress and they’d all seen that fifty times already. Rachel had left some of her dresses behind when she got married. Quickly Elinor slipped across the corridor into what had been her sister’s bedroom.
The wardrobe released a smell of faded roses: the ghost of corsages past. Elinor ran her finger along the rails, selected a black dress and, standing in front of the cheval mirror, held it against her. Another girl stared back at her: alert, aroused, apprehensive, excited. She undressed, fetched a pair of Rachel’s stays from the drawer and squeezed herself into them. Now the dress. A black waterfall of satin fell heavy and cool over her face. She looked in the glass again, afraid of seeing a child dressed up in her big sister’s clothes – though she was older now than Rachel had been when she first wore this dress. Instead, she saw that the dress had transformed her. Her breasts were hoisted up by the stays. She looked down at them, feeling her breath hot on her skin, excited, though more by the imagined reaction of men than by any desire of her own. Yes – smoothing the skirt down, admiring the shape the stays gave her – yes. The effect was too formal, for what was, after all, little more than a family party, but that didn’t matter. She’d make a joke of it, explain her mother was always complaining she made no effort, so look, here I am, she’d say, making an effort.
Halfway down the stairs she saw herself endlessly replicated in the tall mirrors that faced each other across the landing. She realized she was dressed entirely in black. Perhaps she should go back and get a stole, or a necklace, anything to make her appearance less uncompromising. In this light even her eyes looked black. She didn’t feel particularly well – she had a pain in her stomach on the left side, low down – and yet she looked better than she’d done in weeks. Earrings, that would do it. But then the study door opened and Father came out. He looked up and she saw the flare of pride in his face. So, altering her posture and movement to suit the dress, she glided downstairs and into his arms.
‘What’s all this then?’
His breath tickled her ear. ‘Nothing. Just thought I’d make an effort for once.’
‘Well, you look wonderful. I think I’d better go and spruce myself up.’
‘Where’s Toby?’
‘Conservatory. Helping Andrew with his revision.’
‘I’m surprised he hasn’t got you giving a tutorial.’
‘Oh, no. I’m off duty.’
The conservatory blinds were pulled down and the whole room glowed orange-gold. The two young men seemed to hang suspended in the viscous air. Elinor stood quietly in the doorway, blinking in the changed light. Toby had taken off his shirt and was standing motionless, arms outstretched, like a crucifixion – though the effect was rather spoiled by the loops of his braces dangling round his hips. His trousers had been pushed down: she saw a glint of dark gold hair pointing up towards the navel, matching the meagre twist between his breasts. Andrew was leaning towards him with something, a pencil, or pen, in his hand. She realized the network of dark lines that covered Toby’s skin were not, as she’d thought at first, shadows cast by the baskets of big ferns that hung from the ceiling, but writing or drawing of some kind. A pattern? A map? Then she understood. Toby’s nerves had been drawn on his skin.
‘Keep still,’ Andrew was saying. ‘Hard enough without you wriggling.’
And then they saw her. Andrew straightened up at once and took a step back. Toby gave a brief, hard laugh. ‘C’mon in, sis.’
‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘Living anatomy,’ Toby said.
‘Will it wash off?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Andrew said. ‘We do it all the time in college.’
Toby was taking in every detail of her dress. ‘You’re looking good, sis.’
‘It’s Rachel’s.’
‘I thought it wasn’t your usual style. No, you look good.’
Andrew was staring from her to Toby and back again. He looked as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. She felt herself blush. ‘Don’t you find it hot in here? I’m surprised you can work.’
Toby reached for his shirt. ‘It’s a scorcher, isn’t it? I think I’ll have a cold bath, try to cool down.’
‘I’m going to sit outside.’ She wanted to be away from the under-current of tension in this room, which she could neither understand nor persuade herself she was imagining. ‘Have you seen Kit?’
‘I think he’s upstairs,’ said Andrew.
‘Nursing his concussion,’ said Toby.
‘Headache.’ She giggled, only to feel immediately disloyal. ‘Actually, it was a very nasty fall.’
As soon as she stepped across the threshold, the colours changed again. The ooze of sticky golden light that seemed to clog your movements was gone. The sky was a clear translucent blue, fading to mauve above the horizon, with small, flossy orange clouds dotted here and there – that outrageously improbable orange that never seems real even when you’re staring straight at it. The trees loomed tall against the glow of light, casting long blue-black shadows over the lawn.
A faint breeze blew, pimpling her skin. Chafing her upper arms, she looked down towards the wood, wondering whether there was time for a walk. Rachel and Timothy would be here soon, and she needed time to think. Somehow mulling over a problem in her bedroom never seemed to work; the familiar walls and curtains merely repeated her thoughts back to her. She was sorry for Kit, of course she was, but angry too. All very well for him to talk about the months and years he’d loved her, but he’d had two other women in that time. Two that she knew about. Kit was very successful with a certain kind of woman. Here, she pulled herself up short, repelled by the snobbishness of the phrase, which seemed to go somehow with the dress, as if by changing her clothes she’d also changed her attitudes. Disliking herself more by the minute, she walked across the lawn and into the wood. Dry beechmast crunched under her thin shoes. She remembered the feel of it under her bare feet, walking back from her morning swim. She’d been Rosalind then, and it hadn’t been an escape, she’d been happy. Now, only twelve hours later, she wasn’t happy and would have welcomed a way out, but she was stuck with being herself. High time too, Kit would have said. Kit, Mother, Rachel. She didn’t want to listen to them, though. Her head was full of other people’s voices. What she needed was to get her o
wn mind clear.
The pool. She and Toby had swum there as children; she’d followed him in – she remembered this clearly – she’d followed him, though she wasn’t supposed to; don’t go in, she’d been told, it’s too deep. Stepping gingerly, she’d clung to the reeds, her toes curling with disgust in the cold ooze. Sun on her back, white, thin legs angling into the water. Why did they seem to bend like that? She’d stared down at them and tried to understand. Minnows would appear from nowhere and graze her toes. There, if anywhere, she might recover some sense of herself. At the moment her life at the Slade, the life she’d struggled so hard to achieve, seemed meaningless. Oh, she’d get over it, back in London, painting again … Only tonight the sense of … exclusion? Was that it? Something like that. She felt sidelined, a spectator at the feast, while all around her other people stuffed food into their mouths. I don’t like being sexless. If that’s what I am. The pool glinted between the trees, catching the last of the evening light, reflecting it back at the sky. Drawing a deep breath, or as deep as the stays would allow, she ran towards it.
Neville was lying on the bed in his room watching a square of sunlight retreat across the carpet. He had both windows wide open, but the air was hot and still and he couldn’t splash cold water over his face because he’d get the bandages on his hands wet. All he could do was sweat and fume.
He hadn’t enjoyed the afternoon much. Sitting in the car, the backs of his thighs damp against the hot leather, he’d felt a complete ass. It was a relief to be back in the house, in the cool shade. Dr Brooke examined the bump on his head, peered at his pupils, made him close his eyes and touch his nose with his index finger. Did he feel sick? Not now. Drowsy? He did, a bit, but he wasn’t going to admit it. He was too afraid of being packed off to bed, leaving Elinor and Tarrant together. No, bugger that for a lark. He didn’t feel drowsy. As a matter of fact, he’d never felt more awake in his life. Dr Brooke washed his hands carefully while Neville watched, breathing audibly through his nose. But even as he gritted his teeth, he was remembering how Elinor had bent over him, how the dark circle of her nipple had pressed against the white cloth. He wanted to groan and, since the impulse coincided with Dr Brooke’s extracting a particularly large piece of gravel from his palm, groan he did. Twenty minutes later, hands cocooned in white bandages, he was free to sit outside on the terrace reading the newspapers, waiting for the pain in his hands to subside.
