The Lover

by Amanda Brookfield

  When there was no answer at the door Daniel felt crushed. For some reason it had never occurred to him that she would not be there. Friday was one of her two days off. He knew because she had told him, hinting, so he had conveniently imagined, that such a day would be appropriate for a visit. On seeing that the garage door was closed however, and therefore possibly occupied by a car, he ventured round the side of the house to the garden. The lawn looked green and lush, like a smooth doormat for the expanse of muddy brown field beyond. He was about to turn back when he noticed a line of footprints – clear imprints flattening the wet grass – stretching from the back door of the house and down to the gate in the perimeter fence. He followed them at once, hope rising again, his trainers sinking slightly in the soft wet ground.

  Frances, stomping into her drive after the discovery that a beautiful morning was no guarantee of a satisfactory session with her sketchbook, was not pleased to see a dirty grey car parked at the foot of her front door. It took a few moments for her to recognise it as belonging to Daniel Groves, whereupon her annoyance turned to curiosity.

  ‘And what brings you here?’ she called, after spotting her visitor leaning on the gate at the bottom of the garden.

  ‘Dervayne Abbey.’ His voice failed him and he had to say it twice. At the sound of her he had twisted round so fast he cricked his neck. The pain of it spread slowly, a burning, fluid sensation that seeped under his collarbone and down into his shoulder blades. ‘I’m on my way there. Popped in on the off-chance you might want to come too.’ He strode back across the garden to where she stood.

  ‘Really?’ Frances could not hide her surprise. ‘But how kind. I haven’t been to Dervayne for ages, years in fact.’

  ‘It was closed for a while, I believe,’ he continued, feeling more like his old self, ‘declared unsafe – too many crumbling walls and so on.’ He followed her back round to the front of the house. ‘So, would you like to come?’

  ‘Goodness, I don’t know…I don’t think I’d better. I’ve got nothing done this morning at all.’ She put down her drawing equipment next to the front doorstep and began groping in her pocket for keys.

  ‘It’s such a nice day…’ He hesitated, wondering if she was reluctant or merely undecided.

  ‘That’s true.’ She slipped the key into its slot and turned suddenly, her face illuminated by a radiant smile. ‘I’d love to come. Give me a minute and I’ll be right back. Come in, if you like,’ she added, hurrying into the kitchen clutching her pad in one hand and her muddy boots in the other.

  ‘I’ll be fine here, thanks,’ he shouted, stamping the clods of mud off his trainers in what quickly became a little jig of celebration.

  Looking back, Frances was unable to impose any coherent narrative on what happened. There was no obvious turning point, no pivotal moment when the outcome of the afternoon became, for her at least, either foreseeable or inevitable. Seeing the ruined monastery again gave her a jolt. She had forgotten its majestic, rugged profile, noble in decrepitude and somehow more mysterious. They and the cluster of other visitors walked in silence round the grassy knolls at the foot of the walls, humbled by the aura of reverence which seemed to shadow every stone. Scattered at their feet, like giant chipped teeth, were broken sections of wall and the occasional smooth-slabbed relic from days of scrubbed refectory floors. The wind in the surrounding circle of bare trees seemed full of ancient whispered prayers and the rustle of vestments. As they explored, Frances grew, if anything, less aware of her surroundings, lost in contemplation not only of blurred images of thirteenth-century monastic life but also, more prosaically, of the occasion of her previous visit. A wet spring day shortly after their move from London. Daisy sulking for some forgotten reason, Felix insisting on trying to climb the ruins instead of look at them. Paul, who had insisted on the family outing in the first place, walking determinedly, commenting on every little detail, working so hard at extracting appreciation that for Frances at least, none was to be had.

  It was curious to remember such disappointment and yet feel so differently a second time; almost like looking at two parallel worlds. Human mood dictated everything, she mused, following a little behind Daniel as he led the return to the car and switching her thoughts to her hopeless efforts with her sketchpad that morning. Without a certain feeling inside her head, she realised, she could not see what needed to be drawn, no matter how hard or how long she looked.

  She was jolted from these contemplations by the sight of Daniel pulling a bulging rucksack from the boot of the car. ‘I brought a few refreshments,’ he said, shepherding her onto the back seat and then proceeding to lay out an elaborate picnic which had clearly been bought for two. Even then, her overriding reaction was one of amusement, especially when he unwrapped two wine glasses from a wad of the previous day’s Guardian.

  ‘You’d have had a lot of eating and drinking to do if I’d said no, wouldn’t you?’ she teased, ‘there’s enough here to feed a small army.’

  ‘I eat a lot,’ he confessed, tearing off a hunk of bread and passing it to her together with a large stainless steel knife. ‘No butter I’m afraid. Just pâté and hummus and a few other things which I thought looked interesting. Especially that.’ He pointed to a Styrofoam pot of pasta squirls and black olives.

  They were sitting on either side of the picnic, their wine glasses balanced on the bridge between the two seats.

  ‘We’re going to muck up your car,’ said Frances, her mouth full.

  ‘It’s mucked up already. It’s a tip, I like it that way. Do you want some of this?’ He held out the pot with the pasta and a teaspoon.

  Frances took a mouthful and chewed thoughtfully. ‘Delicious. Try it.’ Through the misting window next to her she could see a small minibus of new arrivals, several in wheelchairs, others leaning on helpers for support.

  ‘Your label’s sticking out,’ he said.

  Disconcerted, she bent forwards, fumbling for the neck of her jumper. They had taken their coats off and folded them on the front seat.

  ‘Here, let me do it.’

  If there was a moment it was then. But upon them so quickly that there was no time to assess it or wonder about it or even savour it. All Frances could remember was that in tucking away the offending label some part of his hand touched the skin on her neck and the effect of it was to make her go quite still. For several moments neither of them moved. Then slowly she became aware of his palm pressing gently against the nape of her neck, while his fingers pushed up through the lowest strands of her hair. She stared ahead, until the smooth brown leather of the front passenger seat blurred to a muddy brown and she was aware of nothing but the sensations seeping through her like the spread of warmth.

  ‘No,’ she said, her throat dry.

  But Daniel had somehow reached across to place his mouth where his hand had been. He murmured her name, burying his lips in her neck, behind her ears, against her hair.

  ‘The food, mind the food,’ she whispered.

  ‘If you want me to stop, I’ll need a better reason than that,’ he muttered, using one hand to turn her face towards his.

  Frances caught hold of his wrist. ‘Please, you mustn’t.’

  ‘Why?’ His eyes were so close to hers that she could see flecks of black in the brown.

  ‘A thousand reasons.’

  ‘There’s only one reason that matters.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘That you don’t want to.’

  Frances felt the blood rush to her cheeks. Whether she wanted to kiss Daniel Groves was not in contention. In another, impossible life she would already have returned his caresses with an energy that he might even have found alarming.

  ‘I am a forty-three-year-old widow,’ she said quietly. ‘I have two grown-up children…;

  ‘I know.’ He ran his index finger round the outline of her lips.

  ‘I have stretch marks and broken veins. I have scores of grey hairs…’

  ‘Where?’ He feigned deep conc
ern, slipping the hand on her cheek up through her hair. ‘Here?’ He ran his fingers through several strands, pulling them out and letting them drop back to her shoulder. ‘Here?’

  Frances closed her eyes, as if by blocking out the sight of him she might will strength from some invisible source inside herself.

  ‘You are twenty years younger than me—’

  ‘Fifteen, a measly fifteen. And what has that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Everything. It has everything to do with everything. In addition to which you are now sitting on the hummus.’

  ‘Fuck, and I thought I was being so smooth and careful.’ He laughed, reluctantly pulling away.

  Frances couldn’t help laughing too at the state of his jeans. ‘Where’s the knife? I can use it to scrape the worst off.’ It was a relief to have broken the moment, to have something to do other than resist him. Deftly, she worked the blade under the blobs of mess on his trousers, wiping each smear onto an old bit of newspaper. She kept her head down, pretending to be absorbed in the task, pretending that the long tight curve of his front thigh muscle, faintly visible through the faded denim, meant nothing to her.

  Daniel meanwhile began hastily returning their half-eaten picnic to the rucksack. The moment Frances had finished he snatched the knife from her hands and picked up both glasses of wine. ‘Now, where were we?’

  ‘We were nowhere.’

  ‘If these windows steam up any more we’ll be arrested on suspicion of indecent behaviour anyway. Might as well justify it in some way.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Frances sipped her wine in an attempt to bury her smile. ‘It’s time to go.’

  ‘One kiss. Just to see how it feels. What harm could that do? Unless…’ he was suddenly serious for a moment, ‘Frances, if it is simply too soon, if it is because of Paul of course – I mean you have only to say—’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’ She watched him take her empty glass from her hands, her fingers lingering for a moment on the stem as if offering some pitiful final attempt at resistance.

  Outside, the handicapped group, defeated by the obstacle course of a tour round the ruins, were already slamming doors and stowing away equipment, too wrapped up in their own world to spare any curiosity for the blurred silhouettes in the mud-spattered grey car parked alongside.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Joseph walked quickly, occasionally patting the breast pocket of his jacket to check the letter was safely stowed inside. March was still weeks away, he reassured himself, plenty of time for an appeal or refusal, or whatever one did in such circumstances.

  The letter had arrived in the second post. Not one of their interim declarations about proceedings and rights this time, but an official notification, with the date for his removal heavily underlined in black. It had taken several minutes to absorb the contents, feeling as he did so all the blind panic of a child. The letter contained two mistakes, a missing ‘r’ from February in the date and the omission of the word you in the second line.

  Further to our conversation last week I am writing to inform that a one-bedroomed flat in Falcon Crescent has become available…

  To Joseph’s troubled mind, the errors, as well as being somehow insulting, confirmed the presence of a malignant intention behind the veneer of polite formality. While aware that there existed systems for resisting such cruelty, he felt incapable of assessing them on his own. The mere thought of even researching how to embark on such a process filled him with dread and despair.

  With each of the council’s recent lumbering machinations on the subject of evicting him from the cottage, Joseph had clung to the logic that by remaining silent and uncomplaining he might eradicate the need for the issue to be pursued. It had never been of any consequence, either to him or his mother, that their surroundings constituted a serious health hazard; if the lights fused there were candles; buckets resided permanently under the worst of the roof leaks; and all the really bad patches of damp were behind the sofa and in the top bedroom, which only got used as a dumping ground anyway.

  The sight of Frances’s garden enjoying a healthy burst of spring growth, thanks to his own handiwork earlier in the year, was comforting. Although his refusal of money over Christmas had been genuinely uncalculating, the reminder of the favour now provided a welcome bolster to Joseph’s courage. Since the death of his mother, nothing had been the same. He felt disorientated, suffused both with sadness and a redoubling of the crippling shyness which had afflicted him since childhood. While grateful for Frances’s house-visits back in January, a part of him sensed that they had been performed out of a sense of duty, that they did not reflect the genuine desire for comradeship which had driven him to make similar advances a few months before.

  The garden gate, warped by weeks of heavy rain, put up quite a struggle. Joseph hurried across the lawn, suddenly fearful that the presumption of arriving the back way might lessen Frances’s inclination to offer help. He reached the corner of the house in time to see the object of his journey emerge from an unfamiliar grey car. He was on the point of signalling his presence when a tall dark young man got out of the other side. Instead of proceeding to her door, Frances hovered near the front wheels while the man locked up, writing an invisible message in the gravel with the toe of her shoe. When Joseph next looked they were moving towards the house together. He shrank back between the side of the house and the fat bay tree that grew under the dining-room window. They moved with the perfect choreographic alignment of two dancers, stepping slowly and in time, arms across each other’s backs, heads turned slightly towards the other. At the foot of the doorstep they stopped and kissed, so deeply and passionately that Joseph, in the midst of the other emotions surging inside his breast, felt somehow impressed.

  Even when the slamming of the front door had removed any immediate need for concealment, Joseph remained crouching amongst the lower branches of the bay, his head full of the sweet, minty smell of the leaves, his heart pounding. He had pinned his hopes on Frances and could think of nowhere else to turn. Somewhere deep inside this practical disappointment he was aware of another, less justifiable emotion; something like rejection, a sense of betrayal. He had been drawn to Frances because of her loneliness, the notion that they shared common emotional ground. Seeing her with a lover shattered such illusions in an instant. That it was such a young lover too, somehow doubled the hurt.

  With a sharp dismissive cough, Joseph at last stood up, ejecting a gob of saliva from the back of his throat and spitting it fiercely to the ground. He was on his own after all, he realised bitterly, stomping back down the garden, vowing that even if he was seen and summoned he would continue to walk away. Having reached the garden gate with no break in the silence, he nonetheless could not resist a backward glance, a part of him still hoping to find Frances beckoning from a window. But all that moved was a jay, a flash of blue and rust swooping along the central ridge of the roof, screeching at some invisible enemy on the other side.

  Instead of returning home, Joseph turned left along the riverbank and walked until he came to the bridge near the weeping willows. The manner of his mother’s death still pained him deeply. No matter how hard he tried to romanticise it in his mind – imagining sometimes that she had slipped into the dark water’s cold embrace of her own volition – ugly images of reality blocked the way. Particularly her face, discoloured and bloated, filled, so it seemed to Joseph, with all the failed effort of that last long struggle for breath. Then there was the question of his own culpability, his failed vigilance during the afternoon she disappeared, which sat like cement in his head, precluding even the remedy of his beloved poetry to describe and so ease the pain.

  He stooped under the arch of the bridge and slithered to a sitting position on the edge of the bank, letting the soles of his rubber boots trail in the water. For a few minutes the guilt ebbed away. He was a little boy again in wellies that were too big, with a mother and a big tea waiting for him at home. Tears rolled down his cheeks, as they often
seemed to these days. That it was unfashionable for a forty-seven-year-old man to miss his mother was a fact of which Joseph was only too well aware. A lifelong acquaintance with the alienating effects of his own eccentricity made it impossible not to know such things. Any doubts on the matter had been erased by the youth who had turned up a few days before to assess the cottage on the council’s behalf. A shiny-haired, shiny-suited creature, brimming with daft, unfeeling comments about being able to start afresh and live like a ‘proper’ man. Joseph had trailed after him from room to room with deepening gloom, dwelling on the hopelessness of explaining to anyone that how he loved his mother went beyond personality; that she had been his protector, not just from the dark old days of his father, wedging herself like a fortress in the path of the blows, but in recent years as well, through the very dependency for which he had received so much pity. The only person who had ever given a hint of understanding such things was Frances, and now he had lost her too.

  Joseph pushed his legs further over the edge of the bank, not flinching as the cold water spilled over the tops of his boots and its iciness soaked into his socks. Taking the council’s letter from his pocket he screwed it up into a tight ball and hurled it into the centre of the river. For a few seconds it caught on a thick island of weeds, bobbing round the edge as if trying to clamber aboard. But then a strong thrust of a current, breaking the surface of the water like a rising fish, caught it with its tail and pulled it out of sight. Joseph squinted into the grey afternoon light, waiting until the blurred grey speck had resurfaced several yards further on before lying back on the bank. He slid his shoulders from side to side in the soft ground, stretching his arms at full reach above his head, relishing the feel of the mud tangling his hair and soaking into the back of his coat. After a few moments his fingers encountered something half buried in the mud. Lifting his feet from the water, he sat up expectantly, only to let out a sigh of disappointment on finding that his discovery was nothing more than a large black plastic bag. Joseph shook off the worst of the clods and peered inside, experiencing as he did so a sudden urge to plunge his head into the dark interior and pull the sides around his ears.