Everyone around her—Virginia, the fluttering nurses, the doctor—appeared quite concerned, but she wasn’t worried. Not hungry, not tired, not in pain, not worried: she turned her head to look at her daughter, to try to convey this.
‘I feel very … not,’ she said. She could tell that this communication only caused Virginia’s brow to furrow further, but Mrs Simpson could not get upset about it. Virginia looked pale to her, a ragged sack of wrinkles and bones, and Mrs Simpson felt a great, vague tenderness. She tried to speak again.
‘Pale … bones,’ was what she said. To her fuzzy and faint irritation, Virginia put her head in her hands and burst into tears.
Virginia was unutterably tired. It was still light, but late, and the nurses, deeming visiting hours to be over, had cast her out on to the street. Not knowing what to do, she made her way the short distance down to the harbour. Before going, she turned to see if she could pick out her mother’s room, but no lights shone from the upper windows.
The day played back in her head in disordered snippets and flashes: the castle, their breakfast, the soreness of the cold air in her lungs as she ran—it must have been miles—for help. Her mother’s tortured, bloated ankle. The doctor seemed confident of Mrs Simpson’s recovery (‘It could’ve been her hip, now, couldn’t it? And when the hip goes, they’re as good as gone, aren’t they?’), but uncertain of how long she might have to stay in the hospital. Unlike London hospitals, it did not seem to be busy: Virginia could almost imagine that they would welcome her mother as a diversion, and might even keep her on for that purpose.
Amidst her anxiety and fatigue, Virginia, as she stood outside the bed and breakfast, was also furious. She felt she had been conned. It was as if her mother had known it all—the tongues, the hand in the vestry—since before it even happened; just as she had clearly known about what would happen at work.
As for God—where was He? Virginia could not, no matter how much she wanted to, ally her mother and the divine. Mrs Melody Simpson would have no truck with God’s plan, not knowingly or inadvertently, just simply not at all. If Virginia were to forge such a link, even only in her mind and only for a minute, she had no doubt that her mother would rise from her hospital bed and descend upon her daughter in a fury. Which meant that maybe for once—just once, she promised the seagull that landed nearby and pecked at the garbage—God had no place here. Just possibly, on this one, long day, while she, Virginia Simpson, had been traversing this nasty, wet island, He had been elsewhere.
God’s absence was also the only way to explain the reappearance of Kenneth Campbell. Although he put it otherwise: ‘Waiting for me outside my office?’ he bellowed from the threshold of the pub. ‘No need for an appointment. You’re expected.’
Virginia did not want to enter the pub, or she did not necessarily want to. But she went in. And found it empty as an office but for Campbell and MacAllister, the publican.
‘Whatever you want, on me,’ offered Kenneth Campbell, with a slurring such that he elided over the comma. ‘You’re grey as the day and you look like you could use a drink.’ Then he made a great, theatrical show of looking around the pub, his hand above his brow like a sailor scanning the horizon. ‘And mum?’ he cried. ‘Where’s our dear mum? Have you got rid of mum, then?’
‘My mother,’ said Virginia, ‘has had a serious fall. She has broken her ankle and possibly worse and is in hospital. I would be grateful if you could show some respect.’
‘That’s a terrible thing. You’ll be needing a drink then. I am sorry. Do you take water with your whisky?’
Because she didn’t answer, Virginia was given a glass of the stuff neat. She did not protest, because it seemed a fitting tribute to her mother: ‘Mother would love to be doing this just now,’ is what she said to herself, not only upon accepting the first drink, but the second and the third.
She and Kenneth Campbell sat and talked—like friends—at the table by the window, as a few other customers came and went and doubtless thought them intimates of long standing. Every so often, Virginia felt the familiar prickle of fear on her neck—who was this man and what did he want of her, after all?—but it would fade as quickly as it had come. She was in no state to sustain terror, or even surprise: she was as empty and light as the husk she had been, lying out on Primrose Hill into the small hours. Only she was being weighed down and filled with words as warm as whisky.
They did not go until MacAllister asked them to leave, and by then it was truly night, or as close as it would get. Virginia Simpson had been drunk before, but not for a long time. Not since she had become the person she now considered herself to be. She was not wild with it—blunted was closer to the truth—but a burden was lifted, and when Kenneth Campbell stumbled towards his lorry and waved her with him, she said, ‘No.’
‘I may be drunk, Mr Campbell, and I may not know how to drive, but I do know that drinking and driving are not compatible. I think you shouldn’t drive. I certainly wouldn’t go with you in such a state. Which is not to say that I would go with you at all, but there we are.’
‘So what do you propose I do, sweet Virginia?’
Virginia stood for a moment and thought, although nothing was very clear, in part because it was night, at last, in part because of the whisky, and in part because she felt either like a young girl or an old woman, but certainly not like the self that she thought herself to be. Then she told Kenneth Campbell he could stay in the little blue room overlooking the harbour with her.
‘Mother’s in hospital, but we are paying for two just the same. So you might as well. You can sleep in her bed. Or on it, at least.’
He seemed to think this a fine idea. Somewhat to Virginia’s annoyance, he appeared neither surprised nor excited: he clearly had no grasp of the enormity of her concession. But she did not feel it was an offer she could retract.
They both moved with exaggerated quiet in the stairwell. Virginia thought of the two men at breakfast and wondered which door enclosed them. She wondered whether they had a big double bed, and whether they lay asleep in each other’s embrace, hairy forearms entwined on the coverlet. The idea didn’t seem alarming to her now, after all the cold wind, the running, the loneliness of the afternoon: it seemed warm and safe.
Just inside the room, on the blue carpet, lay a folded square of white paper. Kenneth Campbell, who preceded Virginia, stepped over it and fumbled for a light switch, but even inebriated, Virginia was meticulous, and saw it at once. It was a note from Angelica, of the day’s date, marked ‘7pm’.
Dear Ginny,
We have had a simply beastly day. Our search has led us to the water’s edge, where we learned from a strange, drunken man (not even a Scot!) that Nikhil’s sister and her husband have gone far away by boat and we have no hope of finding them. Nikhil, as you can imagine, is feeling rather black about it all, and we could both do with some cheering up. Regale us with details of the ancestral home over supper? Bring mum. My treat. Give us a ring at the hotel? Love, Angel.
Angelica’s handwriting was loopy and rounded, and she had drawn and shaded in a heart between ‘love’ and her name. Cheerful though the note was, Virginia could sense the disappointment behind it. She had a faint recollection that this couple—in particular this missing man—was to have held the answer, the key.
She could hear Kenneth Campbell peeing in the capsule lavatory. She did not come from a world where men were close enough to burp or swear, let alone go to the bathroom, but this man was in her bedroom, because she had allowed him to be. Virginia was suddenly shaky and had to sit down. On her own bed; she was careful; he had already sullied her mother’s sheets by intention alone.
He himself seemed awkward when he emerged from the bathroom, as if he had only just realized that he—or they—had done something out of the ordinary.
‘Small, ah, small facilities, eh?’ he ventured, looking out of the window. ‘Must be a nice view in the day.’
Their discomfort was sobering them both up: not, Virginia r
ecognized, desirable. This whole sequence of events, she decided, was not pleasant, but there was a point to be proven and it was best taken care of efficiently.
‘That is your bed,’ she said, pointing at the one she wasn’t sitting on. ‘I think my mother would be grateful if you didn’t use the pillow. I mean, she likes to, and two people—it’s not very sanitary.’
He went and sat on his bed. She could see in the lamp’s filmy light that his cheeks were dusted with grey stubble, and one of his eyes was ticking slightly. He tested the bedsprings with his fingertips and then lay back, deftly removing the pillow from behind his head before so much as a hair had touched it. He leaned it vertically against the bed, on the floor. He did not take his shoes off, and his eyes were already shut.
Virginia didn’t know whether this was an ideal or an anticlimax: she felt deprived of her fear. She sat, her body facing the room, her head turned to watch him. Long after she assumed he was asleep, he opened one eye.
‘Virginia Simpson,’ he said. ‘You can go to sleep if you want to. I may be a flawed man but I am not a bad man and you’ve nothing to fret about as long as I’m here.’ Then he shut his eye again. ‘We’re all frightened,’ he said after a minute, in a low voice. ‘It’s just a question of degree.’
Virginia held his words to her, closer than she had ever held her Bible. She didn’t mind when he started to snore, a great, gargantuan, bottomless rumble, wholly unlike her mother’s piccolo whistle. She just sat there looking at him, and then out to the black water, and then back at him, until, not so long after, it began to get light again. She didn’t even think to thank God.
BALI
AFTER THE PARTY, everything changed. For a start, Frank moved in. He slept sprawled on the bed in the main room and remained slumbering, imperturbable, for hours after Jenny and the others started work in the morning. Not even the pool-makers’ vigorous stone-cutting could wake him.
But his objectionable presence was not the only alteration. A weight hung in the air, heavier each day; Emmy could feel it. Aimée wasn’t its sole source, either: Jenny behaved differently, and so did Max (whom Aimée insisted on calling Christopher). Meanwhile, Buddy all but disappeared, and even the languid K’tut did not surface for a couple of days at a time.
Most people, Emmy knew, would take these subterranean currents as an indication that it was time to move on; but most people, she also told herself, would have something to move on to. Since the night of the party—since Buddy’s tiny kiss—she felt that she was accepted, by those who counted, anyway, as basically one of the family. And she was determined to stay where she was until she was good and ready. There were still things to be learned in the Sparke household. Emmy continued to imagine that her future (seeing as her past was gone) might lie somewhere hidden in this place: perhaps she, too, could belong to this tight community of misfits?
That said, Emmy was growing bored. Bored of the routine, or lack of it; bored of the pointed silences that punctuated many of the goings-on; bored of waiting. That was really the source of the tension, and possibly the reason why Emmy couldn’t bring herself to go: a full week after the party, everybody was waiting, coiled like springs, unspeaking. Even the slothful Frank was waiting. In the conversation she had overheard and only half recalled, Kraut had said something about ‘next month’. Next month was just about to become ‘this month’, and now everyone was so tired of waiting for whatever it was that they were all ready to burst. Which, Emmy reflected as she splashed in the hotel pool, beneath the outlet of the mountain spring, was all very boring indeed.
Emmy stood in the shallow end, her body underwater. She loved the way the refraction of light created a disjunction between what was above and what beneath the water’s skin. And she loved the way that her legs appeared to shimmer slimly in that other world just beneath her. That silvery, elusive self was much closer to the person she considered herself to be than was the matronly torso rising up out of the depths. When she lay in bed at night, in the darkness, with the cicadas singing, she was this aquatic being: invisible as it was to her, this was the body she imagined.
A fluttering at the edge of her vision made Emmy look up. Jenny was at the poolside, waving at her, with apparent urgency. Emmy swam over in a few brisk strokes.
‘Where’s Max? Have you seen Max?’ Jenny’s eyes were open very wide.
‘Not at all, not this morning. Why?’ Emmy had water in her ear and jigged up and down with her head tilted to try to get it out.
‘It’s not important. No, it is very important, but it doesn’t matter.’
Emmy stopped hopping. ‘What do you mean? I thought you and Max weren’t speaking. Am I the only one who isn’t to know what’s going on?’
‘Of course Max and I are friends. Do not be angry. Very good friends. It is only Aimée who does not like me. She tries to make my life very, very hard, and I worry that if she hurts me I will not go to Australia.’ Jenny, who had been squatting on her haunches, sat flat on the grass at the water’s edge. Her one long plait snaked across her shoulder and hung down between her breasts. She looked miserable.
‘What you really mean is that Aimée will make trouble for you if she finds out about you and Buddy.’
Jenny did not look at Emmy; she did not say yes or no.
‘But what hold does Aimée have?’ Emmy genuinely wondered. ‘She and Buddy aren’t lovers any more, are they?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘I only know the room I am in,’ she said. ‘I do not know the rooms of others. But there is also Ruby. Buddy loves his children very much. He loves Max very much.’
Facing the sun, Emmy’s back had grown dry and hot. All of her that was above the water had, in the heat, regained its fixed and freckled parameters. Even her bathing-suit was starting to dry. ‘So why are you looking for Max, then, in such a hurry?’
‘Buddy would like to go to Komodo, for the dragons, as soon as Max is completely well.’
‘Not today, surely?’
Jenny shrugged again. ‘I want to talk to him,’ she said, standing to go. ‘Maybe if you see him you will tell him I am looking.’
She turned and was heading off when she stopped and came back to the water’s edge. ‘Is it easy to swim?’
‘Of course it is,’ said Emmy. ‘Do you want me to teach you some time?’
Jenny nodded and then darted away, her plait beating time against her back.
Later, as Emmy walked barefoot up the prickly, stony slope to the house, she saw a car pull up on the road a few metres away. Kraut, who was driving, honked the horn several times and then got out, his ears more pointed than ever. He walked over to Buddy’s house—with the awkward, halting gait of people wearing flip-flops—and began to shout in what sounded like German.
A vision in lurid batiks, Buddy appeared at the top of the stairs leading down from the kitchen to the road—the back way out. And in time to Kraut’s shouting, he sprinted down the stairs and along to the car. Emmy had never seen Buddy run. Even coming down Abang, he had kept to a stately, if athletic, pace. The two men got into the car, honked some more, to scatter any women or children or cocks or ducks that might take it upon themselves to round the bend at that moment and then, in a cloud of dust, they were gone. Northwards. Away from Ubud, but not towards Kintamani, either. Just gone.
The world settled back into midday silence, the sounds of heat and hovering insects and the distant whooping of voices and the thud of the stonemasons. Her feet stinging, Emmy passed through the carved Sparke portal and climbed the rest of the way to the house.
Except for Ruby, the main room was quiet. Quiet, but full: clad in his linen suit, barefoot, Frank lounged on the bed, scanning a tattered magazine; at the table, Jenny, bent over a massive arrangement of flowers, fiddled; while Aimée lounged in an armchair by the veranda’s edge, smoking and watching Ruby canter up and down, squealing like a banshee, naked but for a pink bow in her hair and her pink patent leather shoes.
Emmy tried to picture the scene minutes before: s
he attempted to rearrange the room in her mind’s eye to fit Buddy into it. Had these people been conversing with each other? Or had a deeper, more peopled silence prevailed?
As Emmy crossed to the veranda, Jenny flashed a squirrely smile, but said nothing. Emmy did not look again at Frank, so could not judge his reaction to her arrival. As for Aimée, Emmy felt her looking, and the feeling was not comfortable. Wrapping her towel more closely around her, Emmy went to lean on the woven rattan balustrade and watch an easier world go by. No wonder, she thought, looking at the bare-backed workmen laying stones, and the waves of wriggling heat across the valley, no wonder K’tut did not come round any more.
After a long moment, Aimée cleared her throat. Not innocently, but in a deliberate way. Emmy knew this because she did it a second time and then, more impatiently, a third. Emmy turned to find that Jenny had slipped away, and that Ruby had been seized and silenced and propped upon her mother’s knee. One of Aimée’s hands gripped her daughter’s shoulder tightly, while the other twirled a lit cigarette in a holder.
Over the course of Aimée’s visit, Emmy’s sense of intrigue about this woman had turned to distaste and thence to dislike. Perhaps it was contagious: the effect of watching Aimée’s effect? Because there was no other cause: since the airport they had hardly exchanged a word.
‘Can so much smoking be good for a child?’ Emmy asked.
Aimée glowered. ‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘how long you are planning to stay in my house.’
‘I wasn’t aware that it was your house. I’m Max’s guest, really, so I suppose it depends on him.’
‘As the mother of Ruby, I am the mistress of the house,’ said Aimée, adjusting the weight of her trophy child. Ruby was sucking her thumb, kittenishly tired. ‘I did not invite you and I do not know your intentions. So I ask. Because I do not like what I see.’
When the World Was Steady Page 21
