The Codes of Love

by Hannah Persaud

  He holds the biro in his hand and looks at Ada beside him. His solicitor clears his throat. He should put the pen down and walk away. Now would be the time. He’ll tell Emily everything and perhaps she’ll forgive him for so brazenly flouting their rules.

  ‘Ready?’ Ada says. He nods, and places the pen to the paper, signing his name to the mass of stones that they ambitiously refer to as a cottage, entering a financial agreement that the rules of his marriage forbid. His nerve does not waver. Is this how they all feel, the adulterers he knows, skipping from one woman to the next with no thought of consequence? He binds his name to the land.

  Beside him Ada pauses, pen trembling slightly. He wonders if this is the moment that will snap the bond between them and set them free. But Ada crosses her legs primly and leans forward, the tip of her tongue sticking out between her front teeth, and signs her name firmly beside his. Outside in the rain again, she takes the keys.

  ‘I’ll drive – it’s time for a celebration.’

  It’s funny how things turn out. Emily’s insistence on financial independence had made it easy. She’d requested from the start that they run their finances separately, with one shared bank account for household expenses. He’d been hurt by this, feeling it a snub, but he agreed to it to keep her happy. So now, with money from his not insubstantial savings, he was able to invest in a cottage that Emily would never know existed. A dam has broken open. He can’t stop the flooding and he doesn’t want to. Everything is his for the taking. The breaking of Emily’s rules brings him the greatest freedom of all.

  They’ve installed a caravan on-site to stay in until the cottage is habitable. It’s twenty years old and is not roadworthy, so they had it transported in. Inside its tinny walls the rain sounds like a machine gun. Tucked into a corner of the plot and buffered by trees on two sides, it rocks slightly in the wind. It reminds him of sailing in his youth, the gentle swell and fall of the waves where he and Emily used to go off the Dorset coast. Emily was a natural sailor with strong sea legs and a gift for predicting the wind.

  ‘We should make a plan for the restoration,’ Ada is saying as she cracks open the champagne that she has left chilling outside in a bucket of partially frozen ice. ‘We need to make progress before winter sets in, make it watertight.’ Ryan leans back on the bed that doubles up as a seating area and accepts a proffered glass.

  ‘It’s May; that’s a tight schedule. Given we’ll barely be here,’ he says. Already Emily’s been giving him a hard time, trying to make him feel guilty for so much time spent away these past few months. Ada climbs onto the bed beside him and wraps a leg over his. His T-shirt sleeve slips up and she kisses the owl tattoo on his upper arm.

  ‘Why an owl?’ she asks.

  ‘A gift from my wife when we were young and reckless,’ he replies.

  ‘You, reckless?’ she laughs. It bothers him that this amuses her. ‘But seriously, why an owl?’

  He shrugs. ‘I was obsessed with them for a while. Look, don’t you think it’s a little ambitious to hope to be in before winter?’

  ‘Ye of little faith.’ She kisses his cheek. ‘I’ll do some research, ask around for recommendations. I know you’re busy, but I can try and get up here more often if needs be. The only limitations are in your mind.’ She’s taken a sabbatical from work.

  ‘It’s hard work being a consultant,’ he teases her.

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ she replies. Sitting up, she reaches for her notebook, which she’s wedged in between the edge of the bed and the window. ‘Look, I made a list,’ she says. She has incredible attention to detail. But he’s not interested in lists. With only two days left before he goes home, he doesn’t want to waste them on things they can liaise about by email. Pushing the notebook out of her hand, he grabs hold of her arm.

  ‘Let’s go and look at what we’ve bought ourselves.’

  Champagne bottle in one hand, he tugs his wellies on with the other, over his waterproof trousers. They arrived fully equipped this time, a whole cupboard of their miniscule storage given to outdoor clothes.

  ‘You’re supposed to put them on under the trousers,’ she laughs, bending down and pulling the trousers out from where he’s tucked them into his socks. ‘Otherwise the rain runs down the trousers and pools in your wellies.’ Standing up, she grins. ‘Honestly, call yourself an architect?’

  ‘I’ll make it watertight, you’ll see,’ he shouts, running the 200 metres to the cottage.

  From this angle the cottage is obscured by the crumbling sheep barn. ‘A guest house,’ the agent had said optimistically. ‘Firewood,’ Ada had whispered. Up to the left he can see the sweep of the ridge, the promise of Barmouth beyond echoed in the distant sounds of the sea. There’s something magical about horizons, the way they dominate what’s right in front of you. ‘A window is a horizon,’ he’s fond of telling clients, ‘just a moveable one.’ Hundreds of views he has found and framed for clients who come to him despairing: neighbours they overlook, the main road right beside them. The last client was beside himself. ‘One tree and you managed to frame it perfectly – what luck. You’d never believe there’s a wall right there,’ he’d said, leaning out. There’s no such thing as luck, just opportunity. He’d moved the window and reduced its size so that the wall next door was obscured by millimetres. It doesn’t matter what’s really there, but what you choose to see.

  More slate tiles have slipped down the bank behind the cottage, the remains of the roof barely visible. At the entrance brambles block the door.

  ‘They grow so fast,’ Ada says, attacking them with the shears that she has left there. He heaves his weight against the jammed door and it opens reluctantly into a tiny hallway. On the left is a bathroom. There is a cracked iron bath in the corner that is littered with dead spiders and a chainless toilet waiting to be flushed of debris that has fallen from the walls. On the right is the main downstairs room. Something scuttles across the floor and an old piece of cardboard that’s replacing a glass pane in the windows flaps freely in the breeze. To the left of the room is an old wood-burning stove, covered in soot. Its glass-fronted door is smoke-stained, concealing the contents. An old armchair that was grand once sits in front of the stove, its eagle-clawed feet now faded and charcoal-stained.

  ‘They didn’t mention a fire,’ Ada says.

  ‘Why would they?’ Ryan replies. Ada is opening the stove now, rummaging inside. She pulls out a piece of old newspaper. ‘Look, from 1975.’

  In what was once the kitchen, a yellowed sink containing a solitary tin mug is the only sign of domesticity. He turns the tap on and escaped air hisses out like a last breath.

  Behind him Ada wraps her arms around his waist.

  ‘We’ll make it perfect, we’ll never want to leave,’ Ada says. There’s a flicker of fear inside him.

  The staircase is brittle and missing steps, but a ladder takes them up into the eaves of the cottage where the floor is intact and solid despite tilting upwards at five degrees. They’ve agreed that they’ll only focus on what needs replacing and fixing, preserving as much of the building and its history as possible.

  ‘It’ll be a workout to get into bed,’ Ada paces up the room. ‘Not that we’ll need it, of course.’

  There is only a tiny window in here and the wooden shutters open inwards. It’s just big enough to squeeze a head and shoulders through, which is what Ryan does now. Nothing can be seen but the forest, pressing in on both sides; the ridge beyond is hidden in the treetops. It’s better than he remembers, virtually a tree house.

  ‘We wanted privacy and we got it,’ Ada says, climbing back down the ladder. He follows and by the time he reaches the ground she is peeling off her waterproof trousers and the leggings beneath, fleece top followed by vest. She’s not wearing a bra and her breasts swell against her ribcage.

  ‘Where are you going, you nutter?’ he calls as she walks out of the front door clad only in wellies. She heads straight for the ridge. Turning back, her long hair lashes her fac
e and her long white limbs mottle quickly with blue.

  ‘Come on – there’s nobody to see,’ she shouts. He follows her up through the bracken that whips red scratches into her legs, up onto the clearing, where the ground falls away below them and now she’s dancing to an imaginary tune, asking him to join her. He grips her cold hands in his warm ones and presses her into him, moving to music that he can’t hear. Minutes pass and then he is cold too, despite being clothed. Her skin is goosebumped and her fingers are pink and blue. He prises them from his shoulders.

  ‘Ada, let’s go in.’ She doesn’t answer and he’s about to say it again when she looks at him. It’s as if she sees straight through him, to his very core. ‘Ada?’ Now her focus shifts to something behind him, and he feels the horror of being discovered out here, in their private space. Her expression turns to that of recognition.

  ‘There’s someone there,’ Ada says. They are miles from anywhere. He passes her his coat and scans the cottage and the field beyond, willing his eyes to penetrate the darkness of the forest.

  ‘Where?’ he says. She wraps herself in his coat, which dwarfs her. It is madness that they are here at all, not least because it is five degrees with the wind-chill factor and walkers die out in here in better weather. He looks behind them, but there is nothing but the cottage and the caravan and, behind, the mountain.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she says, walking down the slope of the ridge, and he follows, still scanning for movement in the distance.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks, thinking of her strange expression just before, ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He looked, I don’t know, tall, fair …’ She stomps away from him and her white legs are vulnerable and thin between the hem of his coat and her wellies.

  ‘Ada?’ he calls, catching up. He is torn between trying to find the visitor and taking care of her. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks her.

  ‘Nothing.’

  The next morning sun pulses through the plastic windows of the caravan, waking him early. He throws his arm out across the bed; Ada is not there. He sits up, banging his head against one of the cupboard doors that has fallen open in the night. Rubbing his eyes, he peers through the chequered curtains. Sheep nibble grass just outside the door. Flinging one leg from under the quilt, he flinches. The sun is shining, but the temperature plummets at night. Back under the covers, he pulls on his long johns and socks, his thermal vest and hoodie.

  From a sitting position in bed he can open the door. When he steps out, a rabbit sprints from underneath the caravan and off into the woods. Squinting into the distance, he scans the area. No sign of Ada. He doesn’t know if she’s taken the car – the road is still impassable, so the car is left at the top where the tarmac turns to rubble, tucked out of sight. He walks up the ridge slowly. Jesus, his head hurts. If they’re to get the cottage built they’ll have to drink less, or at least he will. No matter how much they drink, Ada doesn’t seem to suffer. They can match each other glass for glass and he’ll wake straw-headed and nauseous while Ada will have been up for hours and gone for a run. He can’t recall whether her trainers were at the door.

  At the top he sits heavily on the grass. Boats trawl the mouth of the estuary lazily, leaving stretch marks in the sea. It’s Sunday and he’s going home tomorrow. Reaching into his pocket, he switches his phone on. It’s one of Ada’s ideas not to check their phones when they’re together. ‘It ruins the magic,’ she says. In principle he agrees, though he worries about missing something important. He angles the screen away from the light and checks his calendar. Like his mother’s birthday. Reception is poor and as he calls the ringing cuts in and out.

  ‘Mum? It’s me, Ryan. Happy birthday. What? Yes. It’s today. Did you forget? Well, at seventy-three you can be forgiven … What? I’m away for work, I told you. Back tomorrow. Okay. That’d be lovely. Our favourite place …’ Out of nowhere Ada appears; she must have come up behind him. She’s in her running gear, iPod strapped to her upper arm. She sits beside him and stretches her legs out.

  ‘I’m going to go now, okay, but I’ll see you soon. Have a good day,’ he says, hanging up and putting his phone back into his pocket. No word from Emily or texts from the boys in reply to his wishing them well in their revision. Gone are the years when they missed him. Emily knows that he has met someone else. Let it run its course, she said. As if it’s a battery-powered train. Would he have ended the affair if she’d asked him to?

  ‘I don’t believe in ownership’, she told him from the start, ‘we are capable of loving one another intellectually without needing exclusivity. It’s not because I don’t care. I’ve committed my life to you, isn’t that proof enough?’ It would have been nice to see a hint of possession though, at times. Once during a fit of rage he’d accused her of not loving him enough. ‘I love you plenty,’ she’d replied as he stormed out of the door. Plenty was not enough, he knows that now. But plenty was all she could give.

  ‘Who was that?’ Ada leans into his shoulder.

  ‘No questions, remember?’ he says, lying back on the grass. No questions about their other lives. No questions about the past, or the future.

  ‘Fine, be like that.’ She walks down the ridge.

  ‘Ada, I’m kidding. It was my mother. It’s her birthday,’ he calls. She doesn’t respond, ‘Ada?’

  Back at the caravan her movements are abrupt. She twists the cap on the thermal shower hard and the plastic comes away in her hand.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ he asks, as she tries to reattach the shower hose, which has detached itself from the pouch of water. ‘Here, let me do that.’ She flinches.

  ‘We had a no-phone rule and you broke it,’ she says. It’s an absurd statement.

  ‘Right, when we’re together. But you weren’t here when I got up, so that didn’t count. Come on …’ He leans over and tries to take the hose from her again. This time she lets him. ‘Can’t a man wish his mother a happy birthday?’

  She shrugs. ‘It was just a shock, seeing you like that, hearing you speak to someone else. It reminded me of – well, everything else outside of this.’ She bends to undo her trainers. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were talking to her. To Emily.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t. But even if I was, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions, if I was speaking to my wife there’d be good reason for it,’ he says, placing emphasis on wife. ‘What if there was an emergency?’ He lifts the shower and places it in its cradle on the back of the caravan. ‘There, it’s ready now.’ She stands under the shower naked and scrubs her skin with shower gel as the water drizzles down. She uses the loofah and it leaves grazes on her skin. He snatches it out of her hand.

  ‘It feels like our time is together is so short, that’s all,’ she says.

  He’s agreed to make a plan. After lunch they draw up an inventory of all there is to be done. The cottage belongs to the landscape and to its past and they are just guardians.

  In the library in Dolgellau they have done some research. It was a hushed and awkward visit with the pins from their visitor passes puncturing their coats. The stern librarian directed them to the darkest, smallest corner. There wasn’t much information available but they did discover that the cottage belonged to a farm labourer back in 1932. He built it with his own hands, scouring the oak timber from the forest and the earth cob from his land. He threshed the wheat-straw, heather and gorse to thatch the roof.

  The skeletal roof timbers that crouch over the cottage can be saved, but the interior walls are lined with clay that is damp and crumbles against their fingertips like aged cheese. They’ll replace it with lime. The grey stones of the walls are from a local quarry and these too can be reused. The original format of the cottage will remain unchanged, with the tiny lean-to kitchen and bathroom receiving the lightest of facelifts. The traditional old crog loft upstairs will be their bedroom. As a mezzanine level it occupies only half the foot plan of the cottage. Back in its day it would have slept a family of ten. The staircase needs replacing. Unusa
ble in its current state, it is missing half of its steps and sags on one side. It is blackened and Ada is convinced it was damaged in a fire, though there’s no record of one to be found in the library. She complains of the bitter taste of sulphur in her mouth. The cottage has been empty for years and the hollow walls have been swept daily by storms. If there was a fire, any residue would have long since been washed away.

  The window at the front of the cottage provides adequate light for downstairs, and the window in the crog loft is large enough to illuminate the small sleeping area. The walls of the cottage are half a metre thick and should provide adequate insulation for the colder months.

  ‘We’ll keep it sparse, simple,’ Ada is saying now as she crouches down inspecting the stone floor.

  ‘I agree,’ he says, ‘no ankle-deep carpets or gilded mirrors here.’

  ‘In fact,’ Ada grins up at him, ‘how about no mirrors at all?’

  ‘You revolutionary,’ he says, moving to the window, through which he’s spotted a buzzard circling. He thinks of Emily at home, moving through the transparent kitchen. ‘Can we at least stretch to a rug for the floor beside the fire?’ Ada walks over and presses her face against his chest, her anger of earlier gone.

  ‘I think a rug is obligatory, given the circumstances, don’t you?’

  By five o’clock the light has fallen below the ridge and in the darkened cottage it grows hard to see.

  ‘We made good progress,’ Ada says as she struggles with the door. ‘We need to source some local builders.’ Though they’d planned to tackle this themselves, they’ve compromised. Staying long-term in the caravan does not seem as romantic as it did at first. Nothing dries out. He hasn’t admitted it to Ada, but the rocking in the wind makes him feel sick. His sea legs aren’t what they once were. He holds her hand as they return to the caravan.