Earth

by Rose Tremain

  Now she could hear the two of them talking as they walked away.

  ‘So why do dock leaves always grow next to stinging nettles?’ Lucy was asking.

  ‘Well,’ Max answered. ‘Nature is very clever.’

  But whether he managed to tell her any more than that she couldn’t say, their voices being carried off by the sea breeze.

  How did he do it, Max found himself wondering on that walk. Just how did Chris get to be so bloody knowledgeable?

  He could have understood it if he was just talking about things which fell within his own area of academic expertise. But it wasn’t only that. The fact was that he knew everything. Not in an offensive, I’m-cleverer-than-you sort of way. It was merely that he had been alive for forty-three years and in that time he had taken notice of the world around him, absorbed a lot of information and retained it. But why couldn’t Max have done that? Why couldn’t he remember the simplest things about physics, biology or geography? How could he have lived for so long in the physical world and not learned anything about its laws and principles? It was embarrassing. It made him realise that he was drifting through life in a dream: a dream from which he would maybe awaken one day (probably in about thirty years’ time) only to realise that his time on this earth was almost over, before he had even got the slightest handle on it.

  Max looked up from these gloomy reflections as he felt Lucy’s hand slip out from his grasp, and saw her run away to catch up with Chris and his three children. The genial, ramshackle, ivy-covered outline of Ballycarberry Castle rose up before them, and she was running towards the point where the river curved, where it was sometimes possible to cross at low tide. Chris was explaining to Joe and his daughters about the tides and the gravitational pull of the moon, a subject (like so many others) of which Max had never achieved anything approaching mastery. He began to half-listen, but then started to feel self-conscious and, by way of distraction, picked up a flat stone, which he attempted to skim across the river’s surface. It sank after a couple of bounces. Turning to catch up with the others, he found that Chris had now gathered all four of the children around him beside an exposed cross-section of the river bank. Even Lucy seemed to be paying attention.

  ‘Now, when a great chunk of the earth is exposed like this,’ Chris was saying, ‘the brilliant thing is that it tells you all sorts of stuff about the history of the area. Can anyone remember what these different layers of soil are called?’

  ‘Horizons!’ said Joe, keenly.

  ‘That’s right. They’re called soil horizons. Now, normally the top layer – this thin, dark layer here – is known as the ‘O’ horizon, but this one would be classified as a ‘P’ horizon, because this part of the countryside is so watery. Do you know what ‘P’ stands for – something that you find a lot in Ireland?’

  ‘Peat?’

  ‘Peat, exactly! Then we have the topsoil, and the subsoil. Notice how the different horizons get lighter and lighter as you get further down. Even here, though, the subsoil is still quite dark. That’s because Ireland has a very rainy climate and rain is very effective in breaking down rock to form soil, and also in distributing nutrients through the soil. But the soil here is also quite sandy, because we’re at the mouth of an estuary.’

  ‘What is an estuary, Dad?’

  ‘An estuary is any coastal area where fresh water from rivers and streams mixes with salt water from the ocean. So, estuaries form the boundaries between terrestrial systems and marine systems. They tend to have very rich soil because it’s full of decaying plants and animals. Look here in the subsoil, for instance …’

  Oh, it was impressive stuff, Max had to admit. But then, you would expect Chris to know about soil. He had been teaching geology at university level for twenty years, and now he was a senior lecturer. Max wondered if his daughter realised this. Probably not. She was starting to stare at him with the same starry-eyed adoration as his own children.

  Soon Chris, his daughters and Joe moved on, chatting away happily, making for the three stone steps which had been cut roughly into the wall, allowing people to climb up onto the walkway and thence along the grassy path to the castle itself. Lucy, meanwhile, lingered uncertainly. She took her father’s hand again and looked up into his eyes. It wasn’t at all clear that she had understood the finer points of that little lecture, but she had definitely understood something: she had understood the bonds of faith and admiration that connected Chris’s children to their father; she had understood the cheerful reverence with which they had listened to him. She had understood all of this, and Max knew, now, that she was wondering why the same feelings did not bind her to her own father. Or, rather, she was now groping for those feelings, with a kind of forlorn hope. She wanted to be talked to in that way. She wanted her father to explain the world to her, with the same confidence and authority that Chris beamed out to his children with every word. As they, too, began to walk on, she looked around her, and Max knew that she was taking in her surroundings with a new kind of curiosity; knew that she was going to have questions of her own to ask him, soon, and that he would be expected to have the answers.

  It happened sooner than he had been anticipating.

  ‘Daddy,’ she began, innocently enough.

  ‘Mmm?’ said Max, stiffening himself for the impending curve ball.

  ‘Daddy, why is the grass green?’

  Max laughed, as though this was the simplest and most innocuous question in the world; opened his mouth to allow the answer to fall almost carelessly from his lips; then stopped, as he realised that he didn’t have the faintest idea what to say.

  Why is the grass green? What kind of question was that? It just was green. Everybody knew that. It was one of those things you took for granted. Had anybody ever explained to him why the grass was green? At school, maybe? What would that have come under – biology, geography? That was ages ago. Of course Chris would know, yes. He would know that it was something to do with … was it chromosomething, some word like that? Didn’t chromo mean colour in Greek, or Latin? Chromosomes – was it something to do with chromosomes? Or that other thing that sunlight did to plants … photo … photo … photosynthesis. Was that what made things go green …?

  He glanced down at Lucy. She was looking up at him patiently, trustingly. She seemed very young, for a moment, younger even than her seven years.

  It was no use. Silence would be the worst response of all. He was going to have to tell her something.

  ‘Well …’ he began. ‘Well, every night, the fairies come out, with their little paintbrushes and their pots of green paint …’

  God, he hated himself sometimes.

  Caroline and Miranda had finished preparing lunch some time ago, and were relaxing at the kitchen table, a bottle of red wine sitting between them, already half-emptied.

  ‘You see,’ Caroline was saying, ‘the trouble with Max is …’

  But there lay the problem. What was the trouble with Max? And even if she knew, should she really be confiding it in this woman, the wife of her husband’s best friend, a woman she barely knew? (Although she was already getting to know – and like – her pretty well on this holiday.) Wouldn’t that in itself be a kind of betrayal?

  She sighed, giving up – as usual – the struggle to put her finger on it. ‘I don’t know … He just doesn’t seem very happy, that’s all. There’s something about his life … about himself … Something that he doesn’t like.’

  ‘He’s very quiet,’ Miranda conceded. ‘But I assumed he was always like that.’

  ‘He’s always been quiet,’ said Caroline. ‘But it’s been getting worse lately. Sometimes I can’t seem to get a word out of him. I suppose he talks all day at work.’ Changing tack, she said: ‘I wonder what he and Chris have in common. They’re such different people, and yet they’ve been friends for so long. Ever since school.’

  ‘Well, that counts for a lot in itself, doesn’t it? Shared history, and so on.’ Miranda could sense something bearing down upon C
aroline, some weight of apprehension. ‘Lots of couples go through difficult times,’ she said. ‘And Lucy seems very close to her father.’

  ‘You think so?’ Caroline shook her head. ‘They want to be close. But they don’t know how to do it. He doesn’t know how to do it.’ Attempting to drain off her wine glass, but finding it empty, she said: ‘What Lucy would really like is a brother or sister. Your Joe looks in seventh heaven, with a big sister and a little sister to play with. It’s so great, seeing the three of them like that. How families should be …’

  ‘It’s not too late, is it?’

  Caroline smiled. ‘I’m not too old, if that’s what you mean. But it’s probably too late in other ways.’ She reached for the bottle, refilled their glasses, and took what was more than a sip. ‘Ah well. Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve. The most painful words in the language.’

  How much further this conversation would have progressed, how much more dangerously confiding Caroline might have become, they would never know. At that moment the back door of the farmhouse was flung open. They could hear the distressed voices of children and adults from the garden, and now Chris rushed purposefully into the kitchen, looking harassed and short of breath.

  ‘Quick,’ he said. ‘Where’s the first aid box?’

  Miranda jumped to her feet.

  ‘What’s happened? Who’s hurt?’

  ‘It’s Joe, mainly. Lucy a bit, as well. Baking soda – that’s what we need. Do we have any baking soda?’

  ‘But what happened?’

  Without waiting to hear the answer, Caroline ran out-side onto the lawn, where a scene of chaos was awaiting her. Joe lay stretched out on the grass, motionless; at first she thought that he was unconscious. Max was kneeling beside him, a hand laid tenderly on his brow. Lucy came running to meet her mother, and flung herself at her, clasping her fiercely with bare arms which, she could not help noticing, were mottled and livid with angry crimson blotches.

  ‘What have you done to yourself, love? What happened?’

  ‘It was the nettle game,’ Lucy told her, between sobs. ‘The dare. We came back from the castle and then started playing it and Daddy was pushing Joe on the rope. He was swinging really hard and then he fell off and landed right in the middle of the pit. I climbed in and tried to help him out.’

  ‘That was brave of you.’

  ‘It really, really hurts.’

  ‘I bet it does. Don’t worry. Chris and Miranda will be out here, any second now. They’re finding some stuff to put on it.’

  ‘What about Joe? He was wearing shorts and everything. His legs …’

  Caroline turned to look at the figures of Joe, stretched out on the lawn, and her husband at his side. In just a few seconds Joe’s father and mother would have reached their son, tending to him, ministering to his needs. But in years to come, it would not be those next few minutes’ confusion and frantic activity that Caroline would remember. It would be this one moment of stillness: the tableau (as she would always recall it) she saw laid out before her as she turned. The prostrate body of Joe, who had indeed passed out, either with the shock or with the pain, lying so still, and so reposeful, that one might even imagine him to have died. And kneeling beside him – crying, too, unless Caroline was mistaken – her husband, fixated by the pain and distress not of his own daughter, but of another man’s child. And the strange thing about it was that, after watching Max so closely, and with so much bewilderment, during the last few days, after tormenting herself with the riddle of his un-happiness, his maladjustment, his sense of being for ever ill at ease in the world, at that moment she saw him – or imagined that she saw him – in an attitude that for once suited him, and made perfect sense: she saw him as a man surrendering to a feeling that must have come so naturally, with such a healing inevitability, that it might almost have felt like a release; a man in mourning over the death of the son he had always wanted.

  Boys in Cars

  MARTI LEIMBACH is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller Dying Young, which was made into a film starring Julia Roberts, and the acclaimed Daniel Isn’t Talking (2007), inspired by the story of her autistic child. Her latest book, The Man from Saigon, a love story between news reporters during the Vietnam war, will be published in 2009. Born in Washington DC, she moved to England in 1990; she lives in Berkshire with her husband and two children.

  WE THINK WE KNOW HIM because we know his label, and this informs all our thoughts. He is meant to be aloof, preferring his own company to that of his classmates, for example. But when the birthday invitation arrives, he presents it to me in the envelope with his name, Alex, in another mother’s florid script, and I think I see him smile.

  ‘You’ve got mail,’ he says in a perfect imitation of our computer.

  ‘Go on, open it,’ I tell him.

  ‘You could already be our grand prize winner!’

  Television speak. He can sing jingles, reel off 0800 numbers, imitate beer commercials, and tell me with perfect commercial inflection that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. So I am unsure if it is the birthday invitation that intrigues him or the opportunity it affords to parrot yet another slogan. Just as I have this thought, he seems to change. Instead of smiling, he tenses, then cranes his neck. He’s about to run off but I loop my elbow through his so he cannot escape. ‘See what’s inside!’ I urge.

  ‘This is for me,’ he says, and now it is his own voice, Alex’s voice, telling me to mind my business.

  ‘All right, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to see what is inside?’

  He seems perplexed, turning the envelope over several times. When finally he uncovers the invitation, he lifts it gently by the corners as though handling a film negative. On it is the name of the birthday boy, a time and date. There is also a location, a farm park, and I can tell exactly the moment Alex realises that this party will take place among donkeys and ducks, sheep and miniature ponies, none of which he can stand. He looks at the invitation as though it is the foul excretion of one such animal, then places it on the bulletin board next to his rail schedule.

  ‘Three o’clock is 15:00,’ he says. ‘It is when the Great Western train leaves Reading station from Platform 5. I cannot go to this party.’

  ‘Fifteen-oh-oh’ is how he says it. He goes to school at eight-three-oh. His bedtime is twenty-one-oh-oh.

  I point out that there will be a lot of children from his class there and that he will miss out on the fun.

  ‘Cows smell,’ he says.

  ‘But they make milk. Don’t you want to try to milk a cow? Or feed the chickens?’ I am duty-bound to bring a tide of enthusiasm, hoping some of it will rub off, but frankly it never does. Alex twirls his school tie, a knotted bit of synthetic blue on an elastic cord. Twisting the tie around his finger, he rocks his weight from one foot to another, staring at the invitation, and then touching it with his nose.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘What if you come at the end, maybe just for some cake and juice?’

  ‘I think I would rather play on the computer,’ he says. This is true, of course. And the fact that it is true now, and that it is almost certainly going to be true at three o’clock on a Saturday two weeks from now, is part of what is wrong.

  ‘But this is the first birthday party you’ve had all year.’ My voice is a careful mixture of gentleness and persuasion. What I am saying is that he will go.

  He rocks a little harder, glances at me, then at the invitation. He untacks his rail schedule, his favourite possession aside from his computer, and re-tacks it so that it covers the whole of the invitation, although there is a little corner where the ‘Y’ from the word ‘party’ can still be read.

  Now he looks at me, scanning my face. ‘You don’t see that,’ he says.

  Our house is a brick box in a row of brick boxes. The front door is a stained mahogany colour, but otherwise it is as close to feature-free as you can get while still having windows. When I
first saw the house with Richard, my architect husband – now my ex-husband – he said, ‘It is like a dentist’s office, without magazines.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, holding up a finger, ‘but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.’ It was all we could afford. I saw no reason to disparage it. ‘We have nice furniture. That will make a difference. And we’ll play Monteverdi’s Vespers in the mornings. We’ll create – you know – atmosphere.’

  I smiled. Richard grunted. I didn’t know it but already he was falling in love with Carla, a draughtsman at his firm. A draughtswoman. Another woman, anyway.

  ‘I like our old house,’ he said. Alex, then three years old, was in the car just outside the front door. I could see him perfectly through the window, strapped into his car seat, silent, with that same studious, slightly worried expression that had taken over every other expression he’d once had.

  We’d already received the offer we hoped for on our old house. We needed that money for Alex’s intensive speech and language therapy. I was thinking practical. I was thinking Alex. Anyway, I’d already bought the little house, a fact I withheld for a time.

  It has been so many years since Alex learned to speak that now I take it for granted. Sometimes his language arrives in disordered fragments – verbs at the end of a sentence as though he is translating from German, or the answer ‘yes’ to every question, like a new immigrant who finds the native tongue hard to decipher but wants to please.