by Karen Perry
‘Oh?’
Her attention is caught, as he knew it would be.
‘A day of trials and disappointments,’ he says, smiling to take the note of self-pity from the words.
‘Jake said eggs had been thrown at your house.’
‘Ah, yes. Some local louts getting their kicks.’
‘They didn’t throw eggs at any other house – just yours.’
Does he imagine it, or is there a challenge in her voice? Until now, he’s had her down as the meek sort, easily led, but perhaps he needs to reassess.
‘Well, I can’t think what I’ve done to be singled out for the honour,’ he replies, aware of how disingenuous this is, but he’s not ready yet to own up to his past. He can’t quite face it, after the day he’s had. ‘Some birthday present,’ he remarks, with a brief laugh that dies quickly.
‘It’s your birthday?’
‘My sixtieth. I was supposed to meet a friend for a drink, but I’m afraid he’s cancelled on me. Still,’ and now he turns as if to leave, ‘a glass of wine alone should do just as well.’
‘Look, why don’t you join me?’ she offers, and he has to push back against the smile of satisfaction that threatens to break out over his face.
‘Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to intrude on your solitude.’
‘I don’t mind – honestly. Jake will be back very soon, and I’m sure he’d love to meet you properly.’
‘Oh, well, then, in that case …’ He smiles and nods. ‘How kind of you. Thank you.’
He takes the chair the young man had been sitting on, while Leah disappears inside for a fresh glass. He can’t help feeling pleased with himself at arriving in this position, the way he’s turned things around. The smell of fish lingers in the air, and in front of him some salad leaves, limp and damp with dressing, adhere to the sides of an earthenware bowl. Her bare feet pad across the paving – he hears the soft sucking sound they make, feels it tickle the nerves at the back of his neck.
‘Thank you,’ he says, as she pours him a glass. The wine is tepid, he notes with disappointment as it slips past his lips, not that he should care about the wine. That’s not his purpose.
She has picked up a napkin and twists it between her fingers. There’s something nervous about her – an uneasiness in company. A silence sits between them, not completely awkward, yet he senses she doesn’t know how to break it. Her shyness makes her all the more attractive to him. It reminds him of Janice Simmons – a blonde timid little thing, with grey eyes that wouldn’t settle. He’d met her at an office party.
His gaze passes over the paleness of Leah’s skin, takes in the small childlike frame, the narrow ridge of her clavicle jutting out beneath the straps of her dress.
‘Tell me,’ he says, watching as her eyes lift to meet his – soft brown eyes, dusty lashes. ‘Which of you is the piano-player?’
An instant flush in those pale cheeks, and she draws her hands back from the table, flustered. ‘Oh, that’s me, sorry. God, I’m embarrassed.’
‘Don’t be!’
‘No, really, if I’d known you could hear …’
‘Please,’ he says, taking the liberty of reaching forward to tap her wrist – lightly, briefly, but the thrill of her skin beneath his touch! He forces himself to sit back, not to frighten her.
‘Charlotte used to play the piano. My wife,’ he explains. ‘It was a great pleasure to listen to her. I always feel that a house needs music to give it a heart. Do you know what I mean?’
She nods, but tension remains in her shoulders.
‘I used to love coming up those stone steps after a day at the office, and hearing the piano before I’d even put the key in the lock!’ He smiles and shakes his head, as if it were a fond memory. ‘Her piano is still upstairs. A very fine baby grand.’
‘My piano teacher had a baby grand. Not in her practice rooms, but in her home. She used to let me call over there sometimes and play. I loved it.’
‘Well, you must come upstairs and play my piano sometime.’
‘Oh, no, I couldn’t.’
‘Of course you could,’ he says plainly, openly, and he can see the want in her.
It’s all about finding the way in.
‘I used to say to Charlotte that when the kids had grown up and we were retired, we should move down here to the basement flat, let Mark or Cassandra take the house upstairs. We used to talk about it, Charlotte and I – about how wonderful it would be to have our grandchildren living upstairs, playing in the garden beyond our back door. And she was insistent that when that day came the piano would move downstairs with us. That was non-negotiable, as far as she was concerned.’ He laughs, allowing the sound to trail off wistfully. ‘The best laid plans …’ he says.
‘I heard that she died,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’
A coldness lodges in his chest, like indigestion. ‘It was a long time ago now.’
‘Even so you must miss her,’ she adds. ‘Charlotte.’
How strange it is to hear his wife’s name on her lips. But stranger still is the emotion it stokes. It’s not expected that he should miss Charlotte. After what happened. Assumptions were made after the arrest, assumptions that hardened into fact after the conviction. That he hadn’t loved her. That he had brutalized her. It seemed an aberration to miss the one you were thought to have murdered.
But he has missed her. At times, over the years. On lonely days, the reels of their early courtship had unspooled in his mind as if he was watching them projected on to the blank wall of his cell. It is harder, now that he’s home, to locate those early happy memories. The later ones carry a heavier smell, rank with the stench of betrayal.
‘Sometimes when I enter a room in my house,’ he tells Leah, ‘I’m sure that I can smell her perfume.’
‘Today must be especially difficult,’ she remarks, and when he looks at her, confused, she clarifies: ‘Your birthday.’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘Sometimes it’s the days of celebration that can be the harder ones,’ she says, and he knows from the clear manner of her delivery that she speaks from experience.
Anton has always preferred the company of women – the way they move, the way they speak. He is more at ease in their company than in that of his own gender. It was one of the aspects of his incarceration that he found hardest to bear – the boredom and brutishness of all-male society. Since his release, he has been aware of women in the street, in the park. He has spoken to them while buying his groceries, or conducting a transaction in the bank. But this is the first time he has been alone with a woman in almost twenty years. It lends the encounter a particular resonance for him, makes him acutely aware of every word spoken, every gesture made.
There is something indefinably gentle about this young woman’s presence. What he’d spied from a distance – a languid grace – now reveals itself as a softness, an empathy that is utterly captivating. Something has happened to her, he thinks.
‘I’m sorry your friend let you down,’ she tells him.
‘Thank you. But these things happen.’
‘What about your son, Mark?’
She means well, but the mention of this presses against the tender spot of his disappointment. And he realizes, too, that he would rather be here with Leah than sitting in Finnegans with Phil or making awkward conversation with Mark.
‘He has his own life to live. And I prefer not to go out of the house, not if I can avoid it.’
‘Why not?’
How to explain the wave of nausea that comes over him every time he steps outside his front door? How it is all too much – the unfamiliarity of places he had once frequented, the oppressive clamour of other people’s voices, the strangeness of everything from the self-service checkouts at the supermarket to the way the human race now seems inseparable from its mobile phones. He would be ashamed to admit these thoughts and feelings to anyone who doesn’t know what it’s like. But in a space made possible by the darkness, by the lull of her voice, he say
s: ‘Because I am afraid.’
‘What are you afraid of?’ There’s warmth to her voice, that empathy of hers breaking through again.
‘People.’
She doesn’t say anything, and he thinks that it is also true that there are things within his house that frighten him: the past, the dangerous drift of memories, his wife’s voice ghosting through every room. He remembers again the pelting of eggs against his house, the anonymous gifts of dog faeces left on his front steps. Nowhere is safe. Except here in the garden with Leah.
‘I find that I get anxious. That’s why I like it here.’
‘In the garden?’
‘It was always my refuge. You wouldn’t think it now, but it was once a beautiful garden.’
He used to devote hours to it, the kids playing on their bikes around him while he knelt there, wrist-deep in soil, coaxing life out of seeds and bulbs.
‘Was your wife a gardener too?’
‘Oh, no!’ He laughs at the thought of it, a deep chortle that gurgles up out of nowhere, surprising him. He can’t remember the last time he laughed like that. ‘No, Charlotte was more of a house-cat. Always more comfortable indoors.’
His wife had never understood the quiet pleasure he drew from this patch of soil, the way it flourished under his care. She teased him about it at parties, his green fingers. ‘He gets down on his knees and takes scissors to the edge of that lawn.’ He’d once heard Charlotte say that to a neighbour at a party, a knifish edge to her voice. She’d known he was within earshot.
He doesn’t mention this to Leah. He shivers in the darkness, unnerved at the flow of Charlotte’s bitterness in finding him out here where he thought he was immune, where he thought he was safe.
Somewhere in the garden there’s a rustling sound. Their gaze is drawn away into the undergrowth. In the darkness, you can’t see the full tangled mess, the briars and rhododendrons rampaging through what had once been a tidy, orderly space.
‘It’s probably just a fox,’ he tells her. ‘The gardens along here always had a lively fox community.’
His wine glass is empty now.
‘It’s getting late,’ she says, and he feels her drawing in. Whatever brief opening there’d been between them is closing.
He wants to keep her there. To say something to draw her in. He has a sudden impulse to thrust out his hand and grab her wrist. Impulses like that can’t be trusted, but he understands the need in him that she has called up from the depths. Nineteen years since he has held a woman in his arms, felt her flesh against his bare skin. A conversation in the twilit garden, the wine, the night deepening around them, he can’t help but conjure images.
‘The first week you’re back,’ Nigel had told him, ‘get yourself to a massage parlour. Or call up one of those escort services. Get yourself laid. Not because you think you deserve it, or because you’ve been thinking of little else for the past two decades. Sex is like everything else that’s on the outside – another bloody link in the chain that shackles you. Do it so that you can rid yourself of it. So that you don’t have to think about it any more. Trust me,’ and Nigel had given him a long, exacting look, ‘you don’t want to have that hanging around your neck.’
Advice that was well meant, but for once Nigel had missed the mark. That is not how Anton is made, not how he functions. The thought of approaching a prostitute fills him with a rank fear that he can almost taste. And he suspects that, rather than providing comfort, it would only deepen his loneliness.
But being here in the semi-darkness with Leah fills a void in him, slakes his thirst for companionship.
‘There is something about you,’ he says, ‘that feels so familiar to me.’ And then he reaches tentatively for her hand, rests his ever so lightly on hers. ‘Like we knew each other in a past life.’
She is visibly embarrassed by this strange display, and quickly he withdraws his hand.
‘Goodnight, Leah. Thank you for the wine. And the company.’
She gives him one of her distracted little half-smiles and stands there watching him climb the steps up to the back door that leads into his kitchen. As he reaches for the handle, he casts one last look down at her.
‘Happy birthday, Anton,’ she calls up softly, and that one salutation – that solitary voice on the warm air – causes something inside him to flutter and hum. A whirring vibration about his heart.
For hours afterwards, he sits at his kitchen table, smoking one cigarette after another, his mind racing.
She will be in bed by now, he thinks, the boyfriend turning over, his arm finding her in the darkness.
Anton pours himself a whisky, hoping it will settle his mind. For years his conversations have been confined to male circles. He feels weirdly agitated after tonight, as if some part of him has been altered. Subtly changed.
He looks at the kitchen window, sees the darkness pressing up against the panes, knows that soon the dawn will seep through the dark – it is never really dark anyway, not at this time of the year.
And now, as the ash smoulders and falls, and he stubs out the cigarette on the saucer in front of him, he sees the shake in his hand, feels it.
He is on his way to bed, still turning over thoughts of Leah in his head, when he sees the envelope on the floor by the front door. The recent assault on his house and the various harassments make him wary as he approaches. But when he picks it up and draws out the letter, a hard little knot forms in his chest at the sight of the familiar handwriting.
He mounts the stairs slowly, tiredness filling his legs, like sand.
He sits on his bed and reads the letter once more. He thinks he catches the whiff of bergamot and lemon – his dead wife’s fragrance.
It is a problem he will have to confront. He cannot keep putting it off.
After a moment, he drags the box out from under his bed, stuffs the note inside it, along with all the others. Then he lies back, stretching out. Closing his eyes, he tries to sleep.
8
Hilary
‘You’re so lucky,’ Claire tells Hilary over dinner, ‘that you don’t have to put up with any of this.’
Hilary smiles and tucks into her beef chow mein while the three other women around the table nod and give sympathetic groans.
‘Hormones, hormones, hormones,’ Claire continues. ‘I’m up to my neck in hormones with Josh. Facial hair, acne, perpetual showering, not to mention the mood swings and the backchat. It’s a nightmare, I’m telling you.’
Hilary twists noodles around the tines of her fork and thinks of an afternoon many years ago, all four of them working in the same school, when Claire, who was pregnant at the time, had tripped and fallen in the staff-room. It was she – Hilary – who had put her distressed young friend in the car and driven her to the maternity hospital, staying by her side until the two of them were admitted to an examination room. There, the attending physician had drawn a paddle over the small hillock of Claire’s belly and Hilary had stared with wonder and envy at the little waving arms, the kicking miniature legs on the screen. And now to think that the tiny foetus she had glimpsed that day is growing chest hair, snogging girls at rugby club discos and giving his mother all manner of grief. Where have the years gone?
‘At least he doesn’t hate you,’ Anna states, leaning forward to make her point. ‘I’ve lost count of how many times Kelly has told me she detests me. That’s what she says! I detest you, Mother. I loathe you. Honest to God. Hell is a fifteen-year-old daughter.’
The others laugh while Hilary empties the last of the wine into her glass, then raises the bottle aloft to catch the waiter’s attention and shakes it to indicate he’s to bring another. Their third bottle of the evening, and the main course has only just arrived, but sod it, Hilary thinks, it’s only once a year.
The St Agnes’s girls’ dinner. Their annual reunion. Although none of them are girls any more, their ages ranging across the upper forties. While, next to her, the waiter fiddles with the cork, Hilary allows her gaze to pass aro
und the table, and tries to see in their middle-aged faces the young women she had first met when the four of them had joined the staff of St Agnes’s, the new recruits banding together, a friendship forged between them that has lasted more than twenty years. Only Hilary and Evelyn remain at the school, but these annual summer dinners when the school term finally ends have endured and held them together.
It could be argued that some of them have improved with age. Claire and Anna are better-dressed, more polished versions of their younger selves. Anna, in particular, is unlined and blemish-free, skin stretched taut over prominent cheekbones, a wide-eyed unblinking look. Of them all, Evelyn looks closest to her age. After a battle with breast cancer three years ago, she had stopped dyeing her hair, given up wearing make-up and drinking alcohol, and embraced veganism. Hilary has always felt closest to Evelyn. When the others had left the school, Anna to take up a different position, Claire to stay at home with her children, Hilary and Evelyn had stuck together, sharing their hopes and their discontents. Hilary can feel Evelyn watching her carefully across the table, raising her eyebrows a fraction to check that she is okay. She’ll have clocked the speed at which Hilary is drinking, and Evelyn, for all her quiet rectitude, is observant of these signs.
Hilary shoots back a warm, bracing smile, straightens, gives her hair a little shake. The wine is threading through her veins. I can cope with this, she thinks, applying her attention once more to the conversation. I can cope with their chatter about hormones and discos, about hockey matches and gym gear, the financial drain of after-school activities and summer camps. I can cope.
‘How is Greg?’ Evelyn asks, shifting the conversation with a view to drawing her friend back into it.
‘He’s good. Working hard.’
‘When’s the new book out, Hil?’ Anna asks, and Hilary tells them August, realizing with a jolt that there’s only a few short weeks left.
