The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

by William Nicholson

  ‘Behold the true prophet,’ he says.

  They follow his gaze but can’t make out what he means.

  ‘Where, Tobe?’

  ‘The true prophet lives among us but he’s in disguise. He’s an angel of the Lord. An archangel maybe. What do you think, Jacko?’

  Jack is all too willing to play along.

  ‘Lucifer,’ he says. ‘He was an angel.’

  Toby Clore nods his appreciation. He has that look on his face. He’s off on one of his jags.

  ‘Lucifer,’ says Toby Clore, ‘does not have a baby. Lucifer does not wear a woolly jumper. Lucifer does not whine that everybody hates him.’

  He sets off across the cricket pitch for the terrace. The others follow.

  ‘Lucifer is filled with righteous anger,’ he says as they go. ‘We worship and obey.’

  Jack laughs out loud. He has followed Toby’s mental tracks where the others are still floundering. This one’s going to be a cracker.

  Toby bounds up onto the terrace.

  ‘Mr Hall sir,’ he says. ‘Please give us a sign, sir.’

  ‘I’ll give you a smack round the head, you cheeky little beggar.’

  The sun comes out from behind a cloud and suddenly the terrace is ablaze with light. Shadows sweep over the flanks of the Downs. A crowd of Year Threes come tumbling out of the French windows onto the terrace and chase squealing onto the grass. Jack saunters away with his friends. When they are out of sight round the corner they all burst into laughter.

  ‘We can’t worship poor old Jimmy,’ says Richard Adderley. ‘He’s a total reject.’

  ‘That’s all you know,’ says Toby Clore. ‘Me and Jacko know different, don’t we, Jacko?’

  ‘He’s the angel who fell to earth,’ says Jack. ‘He’s the lord of hell.’

  ‘See, Richard?’ says Toby. ‘You shouldn’t go round assuming you know about people. People aren’t the way they look. Are they, Jacko?’

  ‘No,’ says Jack. ‘People are random.’

  53

  He’s sitting on the stone steps of the hotel warming himself in the sudden sunshine like an orphan. Dressed as he was before, smart shoes, light jacket, his grey-gold hair ruffled by the breeze. He tracks the Volvo with his eyes, the corners crinkling, his mouth acknowledging her punctuality with a wry smile. He doesn’t move. As always, everything about Nick Crocker is unemphatic, his attention only granted slowly. But here he is, waiting for her.

  ‘Nick, we’re going for a walk. Don’t you have any boots?’

  ‘No,’ he says, getting into the car.

  ‘You’ll ruin your shoes.’

  ‘They’ll be okay.’

  She swings the car round the gravel sweep and heads back out onto the main road.

  ‘We’re lucky. We’ve got a fine day.’

  He says nothing. Looks out at the scenery.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Anywhere,’ he says. ‘You decide.’

  ‘We’ll do the home walk. It starts at one end of the village and goes up to the top, and brings us back down again by the church.’

  This is Laura’s compromise with herself. She’s seeing Nick alone, but seeing him on family territory. No hole-and-corner assignation. Not that there’s likely to be anyone else on Edenfield Hill on a Monday afternoon.

  She turns off the main road at the roundabout and drives through the village, past the church and the farm and the cricket pitch, to the gates of Edenfield Place.

  ‘We’ll leave the car at the back of the big house. There’s a path leads up onto the Downs from there.’

  When they get out Nick looks at her, studying her in that way he has, taking in her sturdy walking boots and her jeans and her waxed jacket. She tugs a woolly hat out of one jacket pocket and pulls it over her hair.

  ‘It’ll be blowy on the top.’

  No one can say I dressed up for him. Nothing remotely sexy about a waxed jacket and a woolly hat.

  He’s holding out an envelope.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘For you. Put it in a pocket somewhere.’

  ‘Can’t I open it?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ll tell you when.’

  She puts the plump envelope unopened into the inside breast pocket of her jacket, wondering what it can be. Only after they have set off through the little kissing gate onto the steep path does it occur to her that she should not have accepted it. This is some power game of Nick’s. He should either give her the letter or withhold it. This giving and not giving is a bait, a lure. But to return it now would make too much of it.

  They say little while they climb. The path opens out onto a tractor way, but the going is still hard on the lungs and the thighs. The ground is a mix of chalk and flint, made slippery by recent rains, and once or twice Nick loses his footing. But he doesn’t fall.

  Laura is setting the pace. Without quite admitting it to herself she wants Nick to have to struggle to keep up, but he’s fitter than she supposed. When she pauses to catch her breath he’s right behind her.

  She points to the four ash trees that line the path, she shows him their low sweeping boughs.

  ‘The children call them the swing trees. They swing on the low boughs.’

  Jack and Carrie with her in spirit: her chaperones.

  He goes and sits on the sturdiest of the low boughs, his feet touching the ground, and pushes himself gently back and forth.

  ‘Don’t you swing too?’ he says.

  ‘I’m too big.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  So she sits on the bough next to his and pushes herself back. Lifting her feet, swinging forwards, she feels the sudden swoop of uncontrolled motion, and lets out a little cry. Nick swings too, and as they swing, moving at different speeds, they collide. Her knees bump against his thigh, then they part again.

  ‘It makes me feel giddy.’

  She gets off her bough. He remains seated. He’s smiling at her.

  ‘What?’ she says.

  ‘You’re even more beautiful now than you were then.’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  ‘You think I don’t mean it?’

  For God’s sake I’m blushing like a nineteen-year-old. Like I would have blushed when I was nineteen if he’d talked to me this way, which he didn’t.

  ‘You’re more beautiful now, and you’re sexier now, and I want you so much it’s killing me.’

  Not now, Nick. It’s too late.

  ‘So you think a little flattery will do the trick, huh?’

  She speaks in a light bantering tone, trying to defuse his intensity and control her own response. But of course flattery does the trick. Married women are exiled from the flattery zone, mothers at any rate, not so many men come on to mothers. It’s been a while. Her defences are in a poor state of repair.

  ‘There’s no trick,’ he says. ‘I promised myself I’d say everything. This is part of everything.’

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ she says helplessly. ‘It doesn’t go anywhere.’

  ‘Me saying you’re beautiful?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to go anywhere. It’s here.’

  He gives a little lift of his arms that’s the beginning of an invitation. Come to me.

  Can it be so easy? Can you take what you want and give no thought to the future?

  Take what?

  A rush of shame. She turns away so he won’t see the desire that has taken her unawares. She wants Nick to kiss her.

  ‘We’d better keep going.’

  Away from the swing trees, away from Nick, not looking to see if he’s following. On up the last stretch of steep track, until the stubby concrete column of the triangulation point comes into view over the brow ahead.

  ‘Soon be at the top.’

  Then the brisk wind and the great cloud-charging sky and the view south over tumbling green hills to the sea. To the east the masts of the radio station. To the west the valley of the Ouse. To the north the wide weald where the ro
ad and the railway run, and the high spur of Caburn, and the great fertile wooded landscape disappearing into the distance.

  My home view. Henry’s view.

  When they come here with the children he shows them how to find their house, which is hidden by trees. First find the pinched steeple of the church, then imagine you’re sitting on its very top and reach out your left arm. There where your fingers are, see, the red-brown roof, the glimpse of white-framed window? That’s Jack’s bedroom.

  Laura stands with Nick Crocker on the South Downs Way, alone in the world.

  ‘Isn’t it glorious?’ she says.

  The wind harries Nick’s hair and tugs at his jacket. He’s as handsome as he ever was, his high cheekbones lit by the spring sunshine. He spreads his arms as if to embrace the fields and the woods and the villages.

  ‘The English countryside,’ he says. ‘Please take your litter home with you. Leave this facility as you would like to find it.’

  Laura laughs but doesn’t understand.

  ‘It’s not a park, Nick.’

  ‘Of course it’s a park,’ he says. ‘You didn’t think this was real countryside, did you?’

  Again she laughs. But it seems he’s not joking.

  ‘Who lives in the farmhouses, Laura? Who lives in the farm workers’ cottages, and the stables, and the barns?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Nick. There aren’t any horses any more, or hayricks, or picturesque peasants.’

  ‘Or farms or farmers or agriculture. Do you know what percentage of the rural English population works in agriculture? Guess.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Nought point three per cent. One third of one per cent! The English countryside’s economy runs on commuters and tourism.’

  An edge of real anger in his languid voice. Where’s all this coming from?

  ‘Have you been studying rural economics or something?’

  ‘I pick up newspaper reports.’

  ‘Why? What do you care?’

  ‘I care about landscape. You know that.’

  ‘It’s because you live in California, isn’t it? You’re thousands of miles away dreaming of England as it used to be, and it offends you that it’s changed. You want it to be all Constable out there, don’t you?’

  Nick looks over the peaceful scene and doesn’t answer. Laura feels irritated. What are they doing arguing about the English countryside, for God’s sake?

  So what else did I expect us to do alone together?

  ‘The thing is,’ says Nick quietly, ‘it’s fake. It’s an image. The final triumph of centuries of mythologizing the rural scene is to turn Arcadia into a consumer product.’ He waves at the view. ‘It’s not countryside any more. It’s city life, with the added luxury of space. City people earning city incomes occupying large individual plots of land. It looks like the old countryside because the buildings are still there, and the hedges, and the woodlands. But the country way of life has gone, and the city way of life has taken its place. This is a whole new culture, Laura. This is the suburbs gone to heaven. This is front gardens on steroids. You’re living in a fantasy land.’

  Now she gets it. Stupid not to have spotted it sooner. This isn’t some generalized interest in social change. This is an assault on her chosen way of life. Nick has never raised his voice but she can hear the bitterness, she can feel the need to despise.

  ‘Maybe so,’ she says. ‘But we like it.’

  ‘I can believe we like it,’ he retorts. ‘I don’t believe you like it.’

  She flushes. He wants to split her from Henry and the children.

  ‘We do and I do,’ she says. ‘Believe what you please.’

  She’s angry at him now, offended by his assumption of superiority. And she’s angry at herself, because she wanted him to kiss her.

  She sets off along the South Downs Way towards the radio masts. Nick falls in beside her. He shows no signs of having registered her anger.

  ‘I know you better than you know yourself, Laura,’ he says. ‘You can’t live a lie.’

  ‘I’m not living a lie.’

  ‘I think you are. Or trying to, at least. I think you’ve let yourself get trapped in this make-believe world and you’ve no idea what you’re doing here. All you know is, this isn’t it. This isn’t the life you were meant to live.’

  ‘You have no idea. No idea.’

  She walks faster, impelled by her anger and also by dread. He talks on, his soft voice burrowing into her self-belief.

  ‘You knew it once. You felt it once. There is another way of living, where you’re alive, truly alive. You’ve been there, Laura, and so have I. Think of that, and then think of this. How can you tell me this isn’t half a life?’

  ‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘Just shut up.’

  ‘It frightens you. Of course it does. That’s because you know I’m right. You know you can’t go on like this. You’re being suffocated here, Laura. You can hardly breathe. You—’

  ‘Shut up! Shut up!’

  ‘If that’s what you want. But you know I’m right.’

  They walk in silence. Laura is outraged that he should mount this attack on her current life, about which he knows nothing. And all for his own selfish purposes.

  His own selfish purposes.

  ‘Why are you getting at me like this, Nick?’

  ‘I’m not getting at you. I’m trying to save you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t need saving, thank you very much.’

  She leads them off the high ridge of the Downs onto the long diagonal track that descends towards home. Now in the lee of the wind the sounds of the world change round them. Here in this sculpted hollow they look out as from an amphitheatre at the show that is England in springtime.

  ‘You’re wrong, Nick,’ she says. ‘I love my family, and my home, and my life. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He stops. He has his head down, looking at his shoe as he scuffs the stones of the track.

  ‘Please,’ he says.

  One word, spoken softly, and everything changes. He’s saying, I don’t want this argument. This is hurting me. I don’t mind being wrong. I mind the distance between us.

  ‘Please.’

  He looks up now, his eyes on hers as she has never seen him look before: uncertain, ready to take flight.

  ‘What is it you want, Nick?’ she says.

  He says, ‘Stay.’

  The word hangs in the air between them and fades and is gone. She can’t speak.

  ‘Stay with me. Come to California with me.’

  For a few moments she allows the sleeping ghost of her past self to wake. She is twenty again and he has come back to her as she cried every night for him to come back. He loves her after all, as she knew he must. He needs her as she needs him. They are together again.

  ‘Is that what you came to England to say?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m ready now. Maybe I’ve come to a fork in the road.’

  ‘You think we can pick up where we left off, after twenty years?’

  ‘No,’ he says humbly. ‘I just want to be with you, Laura.’

  ‘Why, Nick?’

  ‘Because there’s only you. Don’t you see? I had no choice but to find you again. There’s only you.’

  ‘But I’ve changed. You don’t know me. You think you do, but you don’t.’

  ‘People don’t change. Not in twenty years. Not in a lifetime. What was true when we were young is true still. We found each other then. That was the real thing. It’s still real today.’

  Little by little, as she hears him, long-ago shadows are lifting in Laura. She begins to see more clearly. Pain and grief have a way of freezing time. She has preserved her memories of Nick intact through the years, ready for this moment of thaw. And with the thaw comes disintegration.

  ‘I think what I mean,’ she says, ‘is that you didn’t know me then.’

 
; He flinches as if she has struck him.

  ‘Don’t say that to me,’ he says. ‘Tell me you can’t leave your children. That I can understand. But don’t rewrite history. Don’t take from me the one truth of my life.’

  ‘Nick, we were young. We were only just beginning to find out who we were. It wasn’t the greatest love affair in history. It was just the first time. For both of us.’

  He stares at her, searching her face for a different truth that gives the lie to her words.

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  Down in the valley the little train rattles over the water meadows on its way from Eastbourne calling its cuckoo cry, peep-bo! peep-bo! It crosses the river where Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Stones in her pockets.

  Don’t look at me like that.

  ‘You’re one of life’s wanderers, Nick. Go back to California. Write me a letter from time to time.’

  He just goes on looking at her.

  ‘Say something.’

  ‘You call me a wanderer. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. If only you knew. I thought you knew.’

  ‘How could I know anything about you, Nick? You walked out of my life. You disappeared.’

  ‘And if your son walked out of your life? If you met him again twenty years later?’ The words coming faster now, under pressure. ‘Would you not know him? No! You’d take him in your arms and hold him tight and it would be as if you’d never been apart. Time is nothing, Laura! Let a thousand years pass! What we had, what we have, yes, what we have right now, whether you admit it or not, is real and true and rare. That’s what I’ve learned while I’ve been away from you. How rare it is to love.’

  ‘But to love someone you have to be there for them.’

  ‘I’ve always been there for you, Laura. I thought you knew. You couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see you but I was always there. And all the time I knew the day would come when we’d be together again. When you’d be close enough for me to reach out and touch.’

  He reaches out one hand and touches her arm. She shivers.

  ‘All I can do is tell you how it is for me,’ he says. ‘If you doubt me, tell me to go and I’ll go. But I’ll still be there for you. All you have to do is call me, and I’ll come. If I have to wait till Henry dies and you’re a widow, I’ll wait. I don’t mind waiting. I’ll be there for you. That’s the only way I can show you what I say is true, and always will be.’