DORSET, 2010
ONE YEAR LATER
The unseasonable November weather holds after the storm, a late Indian summer scented with bonfires, the smoke twisting through sunlit branches still hung with the last shriveled leaves. Smashed tiles lie in the road, a window frame rests on glinting shards of glass. The man who owns the shop bends awkwardly over his paunch, his stocky legs spread wide, to pick up scattered milk crates and an overturned metal bin. Wisps of ginger hair fall forward and he wipes them carefully back into place with thick fingers, all the while talking with relish of the storm’s wreckage in the village.
Then he says, “Mary told me young Dan will be cutting up what’s left of your apple tree today. I’ll take whatever you don’t need. Cash.”
I go inside the shop and turn toward the shelves, feeling breathless. Is this what happens when you step outside your space? People start to close in around you. I should have known. I put apples in my basket, coffee, and a little pot of Marmite. My hands are stiff from yesterday’s sawing and I almost drop the jar of coffee. Dan will stumble awkwardly into my quietness. I’ll have to get something for him to eat. Biscuits, baked beans. Not enough. There are frozen hamburgers in the small freezer. I reach for milk, juice, beer. A bag of onions in a dusty cardboard box—I can manage this, he’s just a boy. I remember that I’ll need to pay him and ask for cash-back at the register, turning my head from the man’s curious stare. I hear the whine of a saw as I approach the cottage. Over the low wall I can see into my garden, where Dan’s bent back and thin arms are weighted with the machine in his hands, chunks of wood already piled around his feet. Bertie pulls free of his lead and bounds up to him as soon as I open the garden gate. I freeze, thinking Dan might drop the machine in fright, or spin around, hurting himself, but I needn’t have worried. He straightens, turns it off, leans down to pat Bertie. He pulls off the scarf he had tied around his nose and mouth to keep out the wood dust. Close up, his face is flushed and sweaty. Dark hair sticks in clumped strands to his forehead; his eyes are uncertain, his smile lopsided. Again I am reminded of Ed, who had that same shyness before it hardened into blankness. Dan ducks his head and glances away; I’ve been staring at him, looking for Ed. He gestures to where he has put the crown to one side, near the wall. The larger branches, still attached, hold their clawlike shape.
“Can I take those?” he asks.
Theo’s photos of Naomi hidden among branches.
My face must have changed because Dan’s voice falters in the silence.
“Only I make sculptures, out of wood. I sort of use shapes that are there already. I like those.” Then he says, “They’re a bit like hands.”
Hands made of curving wood. I make them kind hands, holding her carefully.
“ ’Course, Dan. Sorry. Help yourself.” I pull myself together and smile at him.
Theo’s photos fade and I go back to enter by the front door in case the mail has arrived. There are three cards on the mat. My heart lifts.
One is a sepia picture of Bristol docks as they used to be. Anya’s tidy writing on the back. It’s her third card to me:
All is fine.
Anya
She stayed, as she promised, even after I left, and for a second I see her picking up Ted’s scattered socks, washing the hardened food from his nighttime plates, gently wiping the dust from the photos next to our bed. I usually send her a card of the beach in reply, though there is nothing much to tell her except that I miss her.
There is another card from Ted, a river scene this time. As usual he hasn’t written anything. He may not even be in Bristol; he probably goes to more conferences now that there is nothing to keep him at home.
A thick blue stripe and white spray. Hockney. It’s from Theo, and for a second I think my memories have surely conjured this up.
In California for a w/e, making a “Splash”! My pictures in SF City Gallery! Trip paid for by year prize (wood/nature series). Coming home for Xmas. (With Sam?)
x Theo
Christmas with Theo. The past four months in New York must have flashed by for him, crowded with study and all the new experiences the scholarship has bought him, but I long to see him; the fair eyebrows, the sheer length of him, the smattering of freckles. His laugh. How suddenly, briefly, he will still put his head on my shoulder as he did when he was little. The way he lingers late in the kitchen, leaning his frame against the wall, eating cereal, wanting to talk. His fierce, occasional hugs.
I don’t yet know much about Sam, apart from the fact that he’s an architecture Ph.D. student. Theo sent me a photo once, his arm around this man—long studious face, heavy glasses, smiling. Something I hadn’t seen coming. Or had I? Ed had never teased him about girls; it was always the other way around. I’d thought art was his main focus and that was why he’d never had a girlfriend. I never went beyond that; I’d been blind to the subtext, unwilling to encompass complications. Blind to Naomi’s secrets too, though hers had led to disaster, not love. I put the postcard down as that thought flares. Out of the window I see Dan moving by the tree, and from here it looks easy, the wood falls as if effortlessly, the low screeching muted by glass. I close my eyes, and into my mind comes the image of the tree crashing over in the dark, changing the landscape of the garden forever.
Ted might not be welcoming to Sam. I want to welcome him. Theo has found someone to love; he has so much love to give. At the same time I’m frightened. Unknown territory. How will Ed feel? How do I feel? I run water into the kettle, sort out the shopping. I know that I mind that he will never have children. I mind that the world may make it hard for him. The man in the shop would whisper to his customers if he knew; in the tiny world of the village they might be curious, gossiping.
I make Dan a mug of tea, and take it into the garden with the packet of biscuits; as I put them on the step for him, he sees, giving a thumbs-up sign. The garden feels warm, and fetching my sketch pad, I try to catch the lines of the branches, their curves gleaming in the bright November air, like dark arms swimming, cutting space instead of water. The sun shines brilliantly on the paper, highlighting sooty grains in the harsh lines of charcoal. All the while the robin makes sudden flutters around the stumps of wood, pecking at the dust, flying to perch on the fallen branches. Walking around the twigs searching for other angles, I sense Dan’s presence lightly behind me. Lying down, the wet seeping into my sweater, I have the perspective I’ve been looking for. Lines curving upward and away above me, coming together at their tips, enclosing a globe of air. Complete.
When the church bells from the clock tower ring out twice, I go inside to cook the hamburgers; as they fry in the pan the unfamiliar, rich smell makes my mouth water. I’ve been living off apples, toast, and coffee for as long as I can remember. Suddenly craving meat, I cook them all, adding onions, then pile them together between slices of bread, and take them outside with two cans of beer. We sit together, on the stone step of the back door in the sun. Dan devours one hot sandwich after the other. I eat more slowly, with the warm light on my face, enjoying the taste of the food. The moment feels good.
“Thanks.” Dan’s smile is gap-toothed.
I shake my head. “Thank you. You’ve done lots here already.”
“Yeah, well. Gets me out.”
“Out of what?” Looking sideways at him, I sense he doesn’t mind this thrown-out question.
“School, home. Other stuff.”
“You like making things?”
“Yeah.”
“Wood?”
He nods. “I like finding shapes in the pieces, jigsawing them together.”
The sleepy unsure look has vanished. He is looking at the twigs, moving his hands, his voice louder than before.
“You’re lucky to know what you want to do,” I tell him.
“Yeah?”
“Lots of people don’t.”
He looks at me.
“My dad doesn’t want me to make arty stuff for a living. Calls it a waste of space. Wants me to go into the police, like him.”
“Will you?”
“Dunno. I s’pose.”
His eyes are clouded with struggle.
I stand up and take the plates. “Not easy, choosing.”
“Bloody right.” He gets up, slides the scarf back on his face.
I come out again to finish the charcoal drawing but it’s colder already, the brightness has gone, the twigs look dull. It all changed in that brief time. Dan starts to gather up the logs into a pile against the wall. Bertie tracks him back and forth, sitting against his legs when he stops. Perhaps Dan reminds him of the boys; they have fallen out of his world completely.
Dan stops for tea, hunkering down on his heels. Bertie pushes into him and he falls back, surprised into a laugh. Later we carry more logs together, and stack them beneath the overhang of the garage. Dan says he will come back to split them.
As he swings his backpack up, he notices the smashed gate. He picks up the pieces of wood tenderly and lays them out carefully, like bones. He looks at the gaping wall. “I could make a new one. Using these bits and some new as well. If you want.”
“Could you?”
I take all the cash I had got earlier and I put it in his hand. A hundred pounds. I had felt reckless when I got it out. Usually I hardly spend anything. The thick wad feels glamorous, unreal, so many sheets of paper. We both stare at it.
“I don’t want all that.”
“Well, so I can ask you back.”
“Okay.”
I watch him go down the road, toward Mary’s cottage, bending forward with the effort of pushing the wheelbarrow we have filled with logs for her. He is at that time when the future has no shape. One day it will come close up against him, and in boredom or panic, maybe because something pulls at his sleeve, distracting him, he will make his choice.
That night I don’t paint or draw anything in my sketchbook. I think about Dan’s choice, which will lead him to everything else waiting in the future. The choices I made led me to Ted, to Naomi, to here. How could I have known? If I go back far enough, it didn’t feel like I was choosing so much as taking. In my gap year, teaching in Africa, a child had walked past me on her way to the classroom. She was limping. When she showed me her foot, there had been an ulcer on the underside, as big as a clementine, packed with stones and grit. At its base I saw pink strands of muscle. After that it seemed obvious. I knew what I wanted. Back then I was completely sure. When you’re young, you think you know everything. When I look at Naomi’s portrait, I see determination, I see certainty. Sometimes, especially late at night, I think about the terrible moment when that certainty deserted her and she realized, as she must have done, that she’d made the wrong choice.