Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  'You talk as though you were dead.'

  'I suppose I might as well be when all I have to offer my wife is the supremely useless word, "sorry".' He looked at her. 'I won't insult you with a whole load of rhetoric. You have always spoken plainly to me. I merely want you to know that I regret what happened, that I regret what I did— me, myself— with that girl, in every cell in my body. I'm always afraid to speak simply,' he said.

  'Oh, all your stupid fear,' she replied bitterly.

  'Yes. God - all my stupid fear.'

  She stared at him for a while and eventually she folded her hands in her lap in the way she always did when she had reached a conclusion. 'It seems to me,' she said, 'that loving someone is all about fear, really.'

  He looked confused. 'I don't think I ... I'm sorry, I don't understand.'

  'It seems to me it's all about seeing the fear—the stupid fear - on another person's face and somehow loving them anyway. If only you had trusted me to love you anyway'

  He glanced up at her hopelessly. 'Yes, I see,' he said.

  'And if only I had been able to do it in spite of you. You've assumed I'm leaving you, haven't you?'

  His eyes flicked to the packed case and then back to her, his face in total confusion. She turned away from him and knew that she was more relieved than sorry to be surrendering her moment of power. 'Well, I'm not. I'm just going away,' she told him.

  When at last she turned back he was still staring at her, and she realized that this was because he did not dare to speak—or even to move. She was not designed for revenge, and because she had long been in the habit of caring for him, she felt pity and wanted to end his pain immediately. She put out her hand to him, but rather than accepting the cool pressure of her fingers, he clasped her wrist with both of his hands—almost as if he was drowning and she was standing on dry land. She was reminded of the way Luke had thrown himself on to her when she collected him from his flat. She was shocked, but she adjusted herself to the desperation on his face and knew that she could tolerate it. 'Alistair, don't push me too quickly. There is a very great deal to live through.'

  'I know,' he said, 'I know, but I can't help it. I love you and I want to be a better husband. There is so much of life left! I've retired somewhat earlier than I intended, and there is a completely different existence to be had now.'

  'Why? Not just because your life has changed. You may remember I have a business.'

  Alistair was ashamed of himself. It seemed the habit of egocentricity was hard to beat. 'Yes, of course you have. Then I want to learn about it.'

  'Tables and chairs and rugs, Alistair? You'll hate it. It'll bore you senseless.'

  'No. No, it won't. I want to learn about it all. God—it's as if I want to get to know you. I want to learn who you are.'

  There was no hostility in the gesture but Rosalind gently removed her hand from his. 'To learn who I am?' she said. 'You always want knowledge, don't you? More knowledge. But I don't think you get knowledge from other people, no matter how hard you try. What you want is facts, but people are like pieces of music just playing for themselves and other people can listen if they want. You don't learn facts from listening to music, do you?'

  'You don't think I can know you?'

  'I honestly think only God's mind could do that.'

  The grandfather clock in the hall chimed its endless eleven.

  'Oh! My plane,' she said.

  'Your plane?'

  'Yes. I'm going to Ghana, to visit Sophie and her boyfriend.'

  'Sophie has a boyfriend?'

  'There's a lot you don't know, Alistair. I probably—no, I certainly ought to have told you, but I - well, somehow I didn't.'

  'Tell me what?'

  'That she's pregnant.'

  She watched him attempt to comprehend this. She felt it was entirely inappropriate to produce this sacred information as if she was raising the stakes in a game of surprises and she regretted the fact that she had not told him sooner, if only for this reason.

  'His name is Kwame Okantas and they've decided to have a child together. I suppose I didn't tell you because it was all I had to be happy about and you didn't bloody well deserve a share. I'm sorry.'

  'My God, please, Rosalind, don't apologize to me,' he said.

  'No, I had no right to keep it secret—whatever you've done wrong. She's your daughter too.'

  She watched him taking in her words. He shook his head with the sheer strain of accepting this new reality: a baby, a new life. His little daughter with a child in her stomach.

  Rosalind said, 'He grew up in England, but his parents are from Ghana.'

  'So he's ...'

  'Yes, he is, Alistair. And they love each other and she is happier than she has ever been and she's going to have a baby. I spoke to him and he's charming. He's a barrister, just like you.'

  Alistair nodded in acceptance.

  'Sophie and he are collecting me from Kotoka airport.'

  It seemed that these physical details gave him some kind of impetus. He stood up, and putting his hand on the banister, he said, 'Rosalind, I'll come with you. It's easy to buy a ticket at the airport and I'll pack my bag in no time.' He started to limp up the stairs. 'There couldn't be a better time to go away and I can talk to Sophie and explain everything and—'

  'Alistair,' she said softly, before he had made it halfway, 'would you understand if I told you that I want to go on my own?'

  He stopped and turned to face her. 'Yes,' he said. 'I would understand entirely.'

  He reached his hand out over the banister for reassurance, but this time she gestured for him to come down because she felt able to put herself into his arms. He folded her against himself and she felt his breath on her neck; it was as familiar to her body as the flow of water is to pebbles worn smooth over time.

  A floorboard creaked in Luke's bedroom and they moved apart, smiling at each other. Rosalind glanced at her watch and said, 'Honestly, what time is this to get up?' But their gentle laughter had nothing to do with their son or with the time - these merely supplied a vocabulary to two lovers as awkward as they were sincere.

  Rosalind picked up her handbag and lifted out a piece of paper with her passport. She said excitedly, 'Sophie emailed this to Suzannah, Alistair. Isn't it amazing? She got it up on your computer. I would have thought you had to be at home—but it doesn't matter where you are any more.'

  'Yes, it's clever, isn't it?'

  'And you don't even need a ticket. You just give them a code at the airport and they whisk you off to Africa!' Her eyes narrowed dreamily. 'Not like when we were young at all. Gosh, I don't even feel as though I paid for it—I just typed in some letters and numbers. Isn't the world barmy?'

  Alistair smiled at her, loving the nervous excitement in her fingers, seeing and hearing in her the girl of twenty with whom he had fallen so painfully in love. He said, 'Rosalind? Will you let me drop you at the airport?'

  Her smile fell. 'Oh. Well, I've already called a cab.'

  'I could always telephone the firm and tell him not to come.'

  'But your leg, Alistair.'

  He knew it was he who was asking the favour, really, and he understood her reluctance to let him encroach on her plans. He said, 'My leg would survive in your automatic, it really would. It's nothing like as painful as it was. Please let me take you to the airport, Rosalind.'

  She looked down at her cases, at the things she had assembled in such a hurry late last night after Sophie had called and the plan was hatched and Suzannah had booked the ticket online. Of course, she could have done all the packing in the morning, but it had seemed urgent to do it that instant. She had given in to the excitement.

  She leant down and zipped up her bag. When she straightened and looked at Alistair again, she found that her heart moved with love for him—just as it always had, just as it had even in the terrible blank time after the papers came out, when her friends asked her if she wanted a divorce. If Jocelyn thought marriage was 'self-limiting' then t
hat was fine with Rosalind, because surely the self needed limits. Loving Alistair was one of the things she had decided to do with her life and, knowing that her anger would pass, she knew she wanted to learn to love him better.

  How could anyone really make up for the wrongs they had done to another person? You had merely to forgive them and decide to go on. Love set this limitation, and if you accepted it, your reward was—love.

  'All right,' she said. 'You take me to the airport.'

  Chapter 26

  Luke woke up with an intense thirst and stumbled into the bathroom to gulp water from the tap. For the first time in weeks he had slept for seven hours straight and he felt blank and dazed. He drank for a long time and then stood, panting, over the basin, wondering if there was anyone in the house. He felt certain there was not.

  He stood under the shower for a while, dried himself carefully, then dressed and went downstairs. In the hallway, he saw his father's bag. Beside it was the history book he had given Alistair for Christmas a long time ago. Not having seen it read, Luke had always assumed the book was wrong in some intangible way - that it was the poor choice of someone who knew nothing about history, or about books, or about his father. But there was the Dover to London ticket stub lodged two-thirds of the way through. It pleased him to see this. He picked up Alistair's jacket and hung it carefully over the back of the chair.

  Sitting on the hall table were the little ornaments Alistair had brought back. Luke recognized them immediately and was again touched that his opinion had genuinely been respected. He picked up one of the boxes. Inside was a lock of baby hair and his heart jumped with tenderness at the thought that it might once have belonged to his father. He lifted out the little curl in its blue ribbon and then, as if there might at any moment be a savage gust of wind, he put it safely back in the box. Rosalind had kept locks of his and Sophie's hair in just the same way.

  Behind the hall table was a mirror. It was with a sudden kind of inspiration that Luke turned to it and looked himself in the eye. He did not speak out loud, but the voice in his head was firm and clear: 'You've lost her,' it said, 'and you know you'll never meet anyone like her again. When it comes to love, the rest of your life is going to be a series of compromises. But the truth is she did not love you. There is nothing anyone can do about this.'

  He felt as if he had poured iodine on a cut. Blinking back tears, he went into the kitchen to distract himself by making coffee. He took cereal out of the cupboard and fetched a bowl. Then he got milk and orange juice out of the fridge. Wasn't there, after all, a simple satisfaction in these daily rituals? They were quietly absorbing. He wondered whether to have sugar or chopped fruit on his cereal. Chopped fruit was healthier, he decided. But should it be apple or banana? He gazed at the fruit bowl. On the other hand, though, muesli was healthy enough already, without the addition of fruit. Perhaps he would have sugar, after all. He was sure he had read somewhere that if you were going to have refined carbohydrates it was best to have them in the morning because you burnt them off most effectively that way. Best to have sugar now, then—if he was going to have it at all, that was. He wondered, with a faint anxiety, when he had last taken a good multivitamin.

  It was not until he splashed milk on to the floor and leant down to wipe it up that his thoughts were interrupted. There, through the kitchen window, was the annexe, solid and terrible somehow, behind the foliage of the tree peony. Luke put down the cloth and gripped the edge of the sideboard. He listened to the lawnmower running next door: up and down, up and down. It was a horrifying sound. Then he rushed out of the kitchen and into the drawing room.

  But there were windows everywhere. There was no escape. Even in the drawing room, where all was peace and stillness—the light mellow on the chandelier, the bottles and glasses ready on the tray, the clock ticking dustily on the mantelpiece—he could still see the top of the annexe roof. He thought about getting into his car and driving away, but immediately rejected the idea. He thought about taking the bicycle out of the cellar and racing off as he had done when he was a little boy.

  But instead he paced up and down for a while, his heart pounding. There was a dreadful weight on his brain, which he had not yet allowed to take on logical form. It was a monolith of ice and it was melting inexorably, seeping life into reluctant synapses.

  As yet he was aware only that he had done something terribly wrong, but this position could not last and he was beginning to realize it. His mouth was dry and there was sweat on his forehead. He began to whisper, 'I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.' But who was he talking to? He rushed to the mirror and watched his lips muttering. There was no reassurance in this!

  He turned to the window and immediately he saw something: the flash of a human shape through the bushes. It had looked like someone heading for the side passage. But it was far too early for Goran and far too late for Mila. His mind felt vulnerable to illusions.

  He shook his head as if he was clearing water out of his ears and then he went over to his mother's desk. Again, he was seeking distraction. In the letter rack, there were a few airmail letters written in his sister's hand. It was odd, he thought, that Sophie had just the same handwriting as their father. Luke's was childish and messy. He supposed that this was yet another thing that separated him from them—but the thought failed to convey the usual slight to his heart and he abandoned it. He wondered what the letters said, but it was not in his nature to read another person's mail.

  He remembered hearing Sophie's unexpected message on his voicemail—about the water buffaloes, about how she had been thinking he might have taken a beautiful photograph of them. He had felt touched, of course, but also indignant, because she had never said before that she liked his photographs or that she cared about anything he did. How much this disdain had hurt him over the years! He had always felt summed up and casually discarded by his clever sister.

  As he relived this awful feeling, it occurred to him that Sophie had actually bought him books of photographs for Christmases and birthdays for as long as he could remember. Huge, beautiful, expensive books of photographs - of animals or cities or spectacles of nature. He had assumed she was implying that he couldn't read. Was it possible he had been mistaken?

  With shame he remembered they were all resentfully stacked, unopened, in his wardrobe.

  He looked at the airmail letters. Where was his sister? The envelopes, which might have supplied the answer, had been thrown away. He knew his mother had occasionally mentioned Sophie over the past few weeks but he hadn't really been listening. His sister might be anywhere in the world: China, India, Africa. Did they have water buffaloes in China? His body ached with concern. He was also plagued by the sense that he had excluded himself from something important and exciting, just as he had once as a child, after long-jump on the lawn at Suzannah's old villa in Spain.

  Suzannah's second husband's son, Jean-Pierre, had plainly landed a full centimetre behind Luke's footprints, but Sophie had denied the evidence of her eyes and said it was a draw. That afternoon Luke had refused to go swimming, as planned, with 'filthy cheats'. He had expected an apology, some kind of justice as a response to this enormous gesture. But Sophie, Jean-Pierre and Gabriel, the local boy they had befriended, had grabbed their towels and run off to the pool without him. In the full knowledge that he was by far the best swimmer anyway, Luke endured splashes and screams of laughter all afternoon while he studied the footprints and snapped dry twigs.

  He hoped with all his heart that those photography books were still in the hall cupboard. It would be just like his mother to have packed them up cheerily and given them to a hospital or a charity shop.

  He bit his lip as he appreciated, for the first time, the absence of that scrawny sister of his, with whom he had fought so passionately all his life. Really, where was she? He thought of all those interminable car journeys through France when they were children - the mutual eye-rolling at the vineyards and churches their father had got so worked up about; he remembered sharing h
eadphones on the back seat as if the pop music was their only hope for salvation. They had communicated with each other in pinches

  or by sticking out their tongues. She had always swapped her blackcurrant fruit gums for his lime ones and, though it had made him feel corrupt to accept them, he had done so none the less. He smiled at the memory of her bony legs kicking against his in the bath when she refused to have her hair washed. Half a life of constant proximity - and yet now she might be anywhere in the world.

  Water buffaloes? What did it all mean? And yet he knew exactly. All Sophie's fantasies had involved distant travel; each one had embodied her fervent belief that if only she could remind herself of the sheer size of the world, her problems would seem unimportant.

  Suddenly Luke was afraid that his sister was wrong about this, that it was nothing more than a lovely idea. For the first time in his life, he did not think he would take pleasure in contradicting her. She was just plain horrible sometimes and she could be sarcastic and intellectually snobbish, but in spite of all this he knew he loved her and that she loved him just as much.

  Poor Sophie—she had hardly been happy and it was not as if he had ever really tried to help or even to understand. He had just watched her getting skinnier and skinnier and told her no one would fancy her if she looked like that. It was terrible to think that he had not talked to her, never genuinely asked her about her life—not once! Somehow he had always been too tired or hung-over or stressed out. She was so dramatic, so loud. He had preferred to block his ears with TV if ever they were alone together, rather than listen to her piercing doubts about their parents' marriage, or her belief that she and Luke were incurably selfish, self-pitying children. She never let up!

  And what of all those wounds she had inflicted on him, which he had so carefully enumerated, which he had tended in raptures of martyrdom and brought out to shock the crowd at Easter or Christmas or on their mother's birthday?

  It seemed that, in spite of it all, love was going to persist. His attachment to Sophie was illogical but undeniable—almost as if it was hard-wired into his genes. Perhaps it was. This thought gave him a feeling of deep peace.