Double Vision

by Pat Barker

  Her attitude to him changed. Previously she’d said almost nothing to him, apart from a brief greeting in the morning, a comment on the weather – once they’d started work, not even that. And, whether because his own inclination accorded with hers, or because he was adept at picking up what other people wanted, he had been resolutely impersonal.

  But now those twitching hands made her curious. Had he, she asked, any artistic ambitions himself? No, he said, not art, he was no use at that. He wanted to be a writer. Even this admission, which was hardly intimate, had to be dragged out of him. He made her feel she was being intrusive, though the question was natural enough in the circumstances, and scarcely intimate. ‘So that’s why you do gardening? To support the writing?’

  ‘Yes. I could teach, but –’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘The trouble with teaching is you’re using the same part of your mind. It’s creative if you’re doing it properly. Worst possible job for an artist. Or a writer I suppose.’

  ‘And not just that. It’s so circular. I did an MA in creative writing and most of the people on the course were going to teach it.’ That rare charming smile again. ‘Anyway, I enjoy gardening. I like doing things with my hands.’

  Kate found that conversation reassuring. It was a situation she could easily identify with: doing odd jobs, scratching a living, because the one thing you wanted to do couldn’t be made to pay. It put him into a context she could understand. She’d done jobs like that as a student – waitressing, bar work, hotel work, anything – and for a number of years afterwards. She felt she knew him better. But then it was back to the long hours of silence, looking up from the work now and then to see his hands making those odd, involuntary movements. Once she came into the studio and found him holding the mallet and the chisel in his hands, feeling the weight of them. He put them down as soon as he saw her.

  She had no conceivable reason to object.

  Winter was teasing this year. No sooner did a day of glancing sunlight suggest that spring might be on the way than another frost set in. Once again the moorhen skittered across a frozen pond, and a pale sun scarcely summoned up the strength to disperse the mists, even at midday.

  On one such day she asked Peter to take her to the timber yard to stock up on logs and incidentally to buy a bag of wood chippings for the sculpture. She wanted a rougher texture, and wood chippings mixed in with the plaster might just do it. She was aiming for an almost scabby surface, not unlike the trunks of some trees.

  It was the first time she’d been out in Peter’s van. It was on its last legs, a miracle it stayed on the road – but there was something nice about it nevertheless. Peter loved it. You could tell by the way he held the steering wheel. She accepted his help in hauling the seat belt across.

  Travelling as a passenger, she felt her disability most keenly. She hadn’t got back behind the wheel again yet, and that made her totally dependent on other people. She was even beginning to wonder whether her reluctance to drive was not, now, more a matter of nerves than of physical incapacity. She ought to make the effort. It was quite simple really: if she didn’t drive, she couldn’t live where she lived. Perhaps she could ask Peter to sit with her in her own car for fifteen minutes afterwards while she drove round the back roads. She looked at his profile, keen and concentrated as he checked his rear-view mirror, and thought, No, I’ll ask Angela. She wanted to keep her relationship with Peter focused on work.

  At the sawmill she climbed down and greeted Fred and his son Craig with pleasure. While Peter and Craig collected the logs, she chatted to Fred, who was saying, as everybody did, that foot-and-mouth had put a stopper on his business. You heard the same story in various voices and accents everywhere you went. The path that ran past the timber yard was a public right of way through the forest, and that was still closed off. Originally they’d tied their blasted yellow tape right across the entrance so nobody could get in or out of the yard at all, and it had taken three visits to the council offices and God knows how many phone calls to get them to come and shift it so Fred could carry on with his business.

  ‘Isn’t it picking up at all?’ she asked.

  No, he couldn’t see it. It was a body blow, he said. His skin was sagging on his bones, and she saw that the red veins in his cheeks no longer looked like the natural high colour of an outdoor life but something much less healthy: hectic, purplish, mottled, the precursor of a stroke perhaps. Craig, standing behind him, suddenly looked less like a gangly teenager, more like a young man, stronger than his father, resilient. And so the generations pass, she thought, as they went off to pile logs into the back of the van, but would Craig keep the business on? Would there be a business to keep? Oh, but surely, she thought, looking at the forest that hung over the clearing like a green wave about to break, surely anything based on timber would survive? Some of the farms might not restock, shops and restaurants might go bust – in fact they had, they did, you saw it all around you – but the forest would survive.

  It was growing colder, the puddles iced over. Her eyes watered with the cold. I will ask him if I can drive back, she thought, feeling Fred’s depression as something she had to counter by taking the next move on her own path to recovery. It was only a mile or so along the forest road, and it would do her good to drive past that place in particular. It would lay the ghost of that night.

  She was looking at the back of the van as she thought these things, the three men standing a little to one side, talking, in clouds of breath now that the setting sun was beginning to slip behind the trees. Fred’s red tartan jacket matched the raw red of his cheeks and nose. She looked at the number plate on the van, the mud splashes, and suddenly she was back on the forest road, at night, tailing a white van. She’d forgotten that till now. Or had it been another occasion? Her mind reached back into its own darkness. No, definitely that night.

  Peter’s van. How could she tell? There’d been no reason to focus on number plates then – and there must be dozens of white vans around in this area alone. Virtually every small business for miles around seemed to have a white van. And yet she felt it was Peter’s van she’d passed that night. He hadn’t mentioned seeing the accident.

  Because he hadn’t seen it.

  But if it was his van, he must have seen it. There was no turning after the crossroads. So he must have been the first person on the scene. If it was his van. The man who came and stood beside the car could have been Peter, but he hadn’t phoned the police. Another person turned up and did that. She could hear a voice saying, ‘…and an ambulance.’ Not Peter’s voice.

  Because he hadn’t been there. He didn’t ring the police because he wasn’t there. He didn’t mention it because he wasn’t there. She was getting herself into some kind of paranoid spiral over nothing.

  He was coming towards her. She framed her face muscles into a smile. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘Would you mind if I drove back?’

  ‘No, of course not. The gears are stiff, mind.’

  ‘I think I can manage.’

  He held the door open for her, always so polite, so helpful. She climbed into the driver’s seat and leant out of the window to say goodbye to Fred.

  Peter was standing by the passenger door, also saying goodbye. She turned and saw his apparently headless figure in the jacket, the only jacket he seemed to possess. Her heart bulged into her throat.

  She couldn’t say anything. This might well be based on nothing more than the delusion of a semi-conscious woman, a woman who forty-eight hours later had been unable to give her own name and address to the nice young woman doctor. Who hadn’t realized she was in hospital. Who couldn’t remember the crash. No, she couldn’t mention it.

  He opened the door and slid in. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sharply.

  She remembered the incident with the glasses. Next morning she’d handed them back without comment, but somehow he knew she’d tried them on. They went straight into his pocket and never reappeared.

  ‘Nothing.�
� She forced a small, hard laugh. ‘I’m just a bit nervous, I suppose.’

  ‘No, well, don’t be. I’ll keep an eye out.’

  He was turning round, looking over his shoulder, doing the checking for her, as he spoke.

  She took a deep breath and turned the key.

  Twelve

  Despite his closeness to Ben, Stephen had met Kate Frobisher only twice, the last time in an art gallery where some of Ben’s photographs were being shown. Stephen had walked round the exhibition, finding some of the images very hard to take in this setting. You needed to be alone with them to achieve an honest reaction. He’d left as soon as possible after congratulating Ben.

  Despite the map, he struggled to find Woodland House, which was set back from the lane behind a thick shrubbery that virtually hid it from sight. It was, as Beth said, isolated.

  The spray of gravel under his wheels was as good as a burglar alarm. Kate emerged at once, arms crossed under her bosom, bending down to peer into the car with a shy, friendly smile. She was still wearing a surgical collar, though it must have been weeks since the accident. He looked for obvious marks of grief and found none, except for two broad white streaks in the dark hair that she’d bundled off her face anyhow. They hadn’t been there before, or perhaps they had, and she’d just stopped bothering to hide them. He wound down the window and she offered her hand and then immediately withdrew it, apologizing, laughing, wiping wet clay or plaster off on the already streaked side of her smock.

  He got out of the car and, after a moment’s hesitation, they kissed, briefly, on each cheek. It felt foreign here, belonged in the overcrowded art gallery with trays of cheap white wine. Here in the country they didn’t know each other well enough to kiss. Answering polite inquiries about the difficulty of finding the house, he followed her over the threshold and into a stone-flagged corridor.

  One ladder-backed chair, a small uncurtained window, an earthenware jug with three gigantic heads of hogweed casting an intricate pattern of shadows across the white walls. A cool, even chilly interior, but then she threw open a door and ushered him into a room full of deep reds and blues, pools of golden light from the lamps falling over books and paintings. Pale yellow sunlight flooding through the large windows made the fire burn dim.

  ‘Would you like a drink? Gin, wine…?’

  ‘White wine, please.’

  While she poured, he turned to one side and there, on top of a carved oak chest, was a portrait bust of Ben – obviously her work – and powerful, he thought. Suddenly there were three people in the room, and this third presence produced a charge that was too strong, too complex, for the length of their own acquaintanceship. Stranded between small talk and the conversation they didn’t know each other well enough to have, they smiled and nodded, but found it difficult to think of anything to say. She had a streak of white plaster on her chin that was beginning to dry and flake. He was aware of wanting to brush it away with his thumb. His hand actually began to move towards her, but then he stopped, horrified by the inappropriate intimacy of the gesture.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ he said, pointing to the bust.

  ‘I’m glad you like it. I did it last summer.’

  So easy and light the reference, but as she spoke the firelight leapt over the bronze face and for a moment the features seemed to move.

  Lunch served at the kitchen table was simple but good. Chicken casserole, hot, crusty bread, followed by cheese and fruit.

  He remembered Robert saying how much she loved the house so he asked her about that, and she became animated at once. Her face flushed – but she had been too pale before – as she told him about how she and Ben had found it, the state it was in, filthy, the old farmer who owned it had no children and so, as he sank into senility, the place had become not merely dilapidated but squalid. They’d walked round it with a torch on their first visit, dismayed by the dark rooms – the windows had been almost overgrown with ivy – but then, drifting out into the yard with an increasingly disconsolate estate agent in tow, they’d seen the outbuildings and immediately, in spite of all the work that would be needed to put it right, they’d known this was the place. Had to be. ‘Can you imagine what it would cost in London to get a place with two studios? Two million?’

  ‘More than that.’ It wouldn’t come cheap even here in the North, where you could get a country house with a deer park for the price of a three-bedroomed flat in Notting Hill. ‘Aren’t you nervous here by yourself?’

  She shrugged. ‘People come for the weekends. Obviously, it’s quieter at this time of year.’

  She genuinely didn’t seem to mind the isolation. He guessed her loneliness was the deeper kind that comes from the absence of one person, and she really didn’t care whether other people were around or not.

  ‘I’ve got an assistant,’ she said, after a slight pause. ‘He comes in every day except Sunday.’

  ‘Yes, Robert said you’d had an accident.’

  ‘I crashed the car – just down there, on that bend – and it’s left me with neck and back problems. So I just had to bite the bullet and take somebody on.’

  ‘You don’t like the idea?’

  ‘Hate it. I like to be able to walk up and down and shout and swear when it doesn’t go right.’

  She was smiling, but he guessed she meant it.

  ‘But he’s all right. It seems to be working.’

  She looked strained. If this had been an interview, he’d have been on to it at once, probing what was obviously an area of doubt. But it wasn’t. He was visiting a friend’s widow. And he was beginning to like her a lot. He liked her lack of pretension, the brisk, workmanlike approach.

  He didn’t mention the reason he’d come till they were back in the living room and she was serving coffee. Then he said, ‘Have you had time to think about the photographs?’

  ‘There’s nothing to think about. I know Ben would have wanted you to have them. And that’s good enough for me.’ She handed him a cup of coffee and sat down with her own. ‘He often talked about you.’

  ‘I miss him.’

  A pause. ‘I’ve got some of his Afghanistan stuff over in the studio. The last things he took.’ Her voice stayed steady, but her eyes were bright. He looked away, giving her time to recover herself, but there was something she had to say first. ‘And I want to thank you for sending this back.’ She touched the amulet round her neck. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You found him?’

  ‘Yes. It was instantaneous. He couldn’t possibly have suffered anything. I doubt if he knew.’

  She nodded. ‘I hoped it was like that. They said it was, but you don’t always get the truth, do you?’

  ‘No, it was.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ A deep breath, ‘So what’s the book about?’

  ‘Ways of representing war. It’s not what they want me to do, they want me to write anecdotes. You know: Amusing Mass Murderers I Have Met.’

  ‘But this is the one you need to write?’

  ‘Yeah. I can even tell you what started it. Jules Naudet, the guy who was following a rookie fireman round New York on 9/11 and just found himself filming the attack on the towers? Well, something he said haunted me. At one point he turned his camera off – he wouldn’t film people burning – and he said, “Nobody should have to see this.” And of course immediately I thought of Goya.’

  ‘“One cannot look at this”?’

  ‘Yes – but then “I saw it.” “This is the truth.” It’s that argument he’s having with himself, all the time, between the ethical problems of showing the atrocities and yet the need to say, “Look, this is what’s happening”… and I thought, My God, we’re still facing exactly the same problem. There’s always this tension between wanting to show the truth, and yet being sceptical about what the effects of showing it are going to be.’

  ‘Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I had this conversation with Ben… oh, hundreds of times.’ The sadness returned. ‘You sh
ould be doing this book with Ben, really.’

  ‘If I use his photographs, I will be. In a sense. And I’ll talk about things that happened, you know, making the ethical decision when you’ve only got a second to make it. You see, the thing Ben and Goya have got in common is that they went on doing it. Whatever the doubts, it didn’t stop them.’

  ‘Rightly.’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  A short silence. He was aware of the flicker of firelight across Ben’s features.

  ‘Would you like to see where he worked?’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  He finished his coffee and stood up. They walked across the yard, the brief thaw already giving way to night and frost. The ruts were harder now, crusted on top. His feet bit into them, then held. A low building faced them across the yard. Kate got out her keys, fumbled with the lock and stood aside. He thought she was just letting him go first, but no, she stayed outside. Was she being tactful and giving him a few minutes to himself? Or had she not been in since Ben died?

  He stepped over the threshold, thinking that perhaps the last person to breathe the air in this room had been Ben. The carpet held flakes of his skin, hairs from his head must lie on the cushions of the sofa over there. The forensic science of grief. We shed ourselves all the time, he thought, shed and renew and shed again until that final shedding of our selves.

  Dust everywhere, and a cobweb in the corner of the window. The last rays of the setting sun caught the glass and turned the death trap into a thing of beauty.

  ‘The light switch is on your right.’

  He flicked on the switch, hating the glare of light that dissipated the shadowy presence he’d sensed in the room. But he pulled himself together and went across to the table. Computer, scanner, a printer – far more advanced than anything he ever needed to use – but along the wall facing the desk there were box files neatly labelled: date and place. The archive of a working life.