440

III

Three weeks have passed since our son’s departure. It is breakfast time and the cat jumps up on to my lap, purring, licking the grease of leftover butter on my plate. Our tempers are foul this morning, for last night involved one too many whiskies to ease our sadness. I stare dolefully at my marmalade on toast, and flick through The Oxford Dictionary of Malaises, only for Rachel to yank it from me.

‘There is no mystery to why we feel so rough this morning,’ she snaps. ‘Does it have a definition for “hangover”?’

Then, as Ginny is clearing away our cold tea, a telegram comes: our dear friend, Penny Worthing, has died. Ginny tells us that she went out one frosty evening last week to post a birthday card, slipped and suffered a bleed in her brain. We share a long silence. Rachel remarks tersely that she is tired of going to funerals all the time. The number of friends we’ve lost outnumbers those that are still with us; we are starting to feel either blessed or cursed – depending on the day and hour – with our extra years. Darwin might put it down to resilient ancestors; Rachel would look to the patterning of our stars.

I joke that it feels as though there’s one big party going on ‘up there’ and that we are being left out. Rachel isn’t in the mood for my morbid humour. She declares that she will spend the day painting, despite the pain in her head. I 441remind her of our plans to go to the fair, and then I cajole her into honouring them, citing the benefits of fresh air. We set off in a querulous mood, feeling quite out of sorts with the world.

We pass through Port Meadow. The sky above us seems huge, blown up to a pitch of terror. In the city, buildings are springing up at a frantic pace, serving to compress the horizon into the man-made and finite. Out here, the sky belongs to God. I feel rather paranoid, as though there is a shadow to my shadow, and wonder if it is the after-effect of the opium. I wish I had taken a little more of that Grand Kuding tea.

Then, as a few spots of rain come down, Rachel laments: ‘I have forgotten my umbrella.’

Fortunately, the weather is indecisive. An aura of droplets, and then it ceases.

The fair is blazing with noise, with carousels and a helter-skelter and a steam yacht, and I muse how glad I am that technology has allowed us to progress from those infernal freak shows. The change in Rachel’s expression as we arrive at the fair is a relief: a bloom appearing in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eye. A small boy comes running out of a crowd, slap bang into her. He is only six or seven, a grubby little urchin, but his shock of thick, dark hair looks just like Finn’s. She gazes down at him, stunned, and gently touches his cheek. The boy rubs away her touch, laughs and runs on.

‘Let me win you a toy,’ I declare, and proceed to blow shillings we can ill afford on the coconut shy until Rachel is clutching a stuffed bear.

Our spirits lift further when we enter the hall of 442mirrors, where we gawp at our stretched and squashed visages. The exaggeration of our jowls and drooping brows is quite grotesque.

When we exit, Rachel catches sight of the fortune teller’s tent.

‘We must go in, we must!’ Rachel cries. I shake my head, but my wife has her ways, her wiles. She curls her arm through mine and brushes her cheek against my shoulder. I kiss her firmly and advise that I will go in first. I will ascertain whether the palm reader is serious or a charlatan, and protect my wife from potential indignity.

Madame Scarlet is dressed in the obligatory costume, her dark hair tied back with a frayed red scarf, her lace blouse hemmed with dirt. I refrain from allowing her to read my palm or my tarot, though, inevitably, she does glance into the cracked depths of her crystal ball and predict tragedy for me – ‘For you cannot fight fate’ – before I stop her and declare that I have no need of her wisdom. I insist that she only speak to Rachel of trivial matters and avoid seeding worries or fears of future tragedies; she acquiesces with a begrudging frown. I take my leave, telling Rachel she can go in.

I wait, and I wait. Someone outside the tent is drunkenly singing the theme from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and soon the refrain is trapped in my head. You will have to face a terrible darkness, the woman had said. You will be tested to your very limits. Damn her. There is nothing more disturbing than an idea that sits in the mind like a maggot: feeding on the faecal matter of fear, breeding. I am ready to thunder in and drag Rachel out, but just as my patience snaps, she emerges. 443

‘I do not wish to hear a thing,’ I say firmly. ‘We will not share her stories – by telling them, we will make them real. Let her tale die inside you, and let us be on our way.’

‘Do not worry,’ she replies cheerfully. ‘It was all very positive. I got the Lovers and the Two of Cups – all is well for us.’

‘Still, you should forget her stories quickly.’

Rachel smiles and touches my arm gently.

It is late and I wonder if we should request a hackney carriage to take us home, but Rachel wants to walk. The grassy lanes are quiet; midges and sleepy butterflies flit across Port Meadow; the scent of summer’s end laces the air. I savour the cooling of the evening and the encroaching dark, knowing that we can stoke a fire in the parlour, and sit in its glow, talking and growing sleepy together, close the door on this wretched day.

‘What’s that noise?’ Rachel stops, frowning.

‘What? There is nothing.’

She cries in protest: ‘It sounds like a child!’

‘I cannot hear a thing, and you are half-deaf. It is your imagination.’

‘It is a child,’ she says fiercely. ‘They’re in pain. And we will not stand by while a child is in need.’

We take a detour through the field and I feel such a sense of dread, but I laugh when I see the cause of the wailing: a calf, its hooves stuck in an iron grate, mooing with such pity that it sounds near-human.

‘Do not laugh,’ Rachel chides me.

We assist the poor creature back to solid ground, and the calf rewards us with a moo of gratitude as a farmer comes hurrying across the meadow. He thanks me profusely, 444nodding at Rachel’s explanation of how we came across his beast without looking her in the eye. I am about to shake the farmer’s extended hand, when he emits a violent sneeze. This is followed by a ruddy laugh and a muffled apology, as he draws out his handkerchief. The hand is proffered again, but I pretend that it does not exist; Rachel, looking embarrassed for him, seizes and shakes it. The farmer continues to avoid her gaze, and instead gives me a look of even deeper apology, as if my wife is some fallen creature who might be beyond my redemptive powers. Rachel’s irritation is palpable. We bid him goodnight and stroll on, Rachel muttering and moaning at his misogyny.

By the time we begin to make our way home the rain has thickened, so that when we arrive, we are more water than flesh; puddles follow us down the hallway. We huddle beneath wool blankets before the fire and Finn curls up between us.

‘My baby,’ Rachel whispers, kissing his head.

We are sweet with one another again, murmuring plans for our forty-first wedding anniversary next year. It is a pact we made early in our marriage, never to go to bed having argued, to always finish each day as friends.

In bed, we share the usual routine. ‘Goodnight, you peevish old crone!’ Rachel says merrily, and I feign deafness and she laughs and we go to sleep with our fingers laced beneath the covers.

The next day, I awake to find that the temperature has plunged so low in the night that there is a frost beading on 445our counterpane. Rachel’s face resembles that of a peculiar sea creature, fleshy and white, eyes puffy and nose streaming. Upon opening the curtains, I see that our damned maid left the window open for the night. I ring the bell furiously, its shimmer silvering through the house. Ginny bows her head as I berate her.

‘You know how dangerous it is, not to allow oxygen into the room,’ she stutters.

‘That is an absurd old wives’ tale, Ginny, I have told you a thousand times.’ I look back at Rachel on the bed. Her smile is vague. Her eyes seem to have acquired a faded, milky quality; there is mildew in her aura.

‘Ginny, please fetch Dr. Adams, and hurry!’ I cry.

She hesitates: ‘You did say we should be economising in all matters, sir.’

‘And this matter is an emergency. Get on with you!’

She leaves with a curtsey and a fit of apologies. I massage Rachel’s hand gently, shocked at the iciness of her fingers. I suffer the foreboding of the coming days; a shadow whose shape I cannot quite define. Suddenly I feel tired. We were doing well, and Rachel had one last painting to finish before her first solo exhibition. It feels as though life has barely had a chance to swim freely before the storms begin again – can it not let up and allow us to be happy for once?

An hour later, I hear the click of the front door as Ginny returns. I attempt to hurry downstairs but find myself panting, limbs creaking.

‘Dr. Adams is just with another patient, but he will be here shortly,’ she relays breathlessly.

‘Thank God. In the meantime, the fire in her room is going out – she must be kept warm.’ 446

‘Well, sir – I do ask that you don’t shoot the messenger, but …’

‘There is no more firewood?’

‘You owe the farmer O’Brien twelve shillings, and I doubt he will allow any further borrowing …’

The desk in my study, the drawer beneath the one that holds the opium, contains bill upon bill, reminder upon reminder: to pay the butcher, the chemist, the doctor. I feel sick as I go through them. A few bad investments in the last decade; some overspending here and there; an opium habit that got somewhat out of control last year. Rachel’s gallery owner is an unpredictable man and will not pay until every last brushstroke has dried on canvas. I am in danger of bankruptcy, dragging my darling wife down with me.

I feel Ginny’s eyes upon me through the kitchen window as I storm into the garden and tear at the ash tree with a hacksaw. The branch that falls is bigger than I intended and as I drag it back into the house, it splinters against the door frame, showering sprays of green leaves behind me. In the bedroom, I tear off twigs and toss them on to the fire; the flames lick up, green-tinged.

At the crackle, Rachel’s eyes fly open and I see the fire reflected in her pupils, the warmth of the glow momentarily giving the illusion of good health. Then there are footsteps on the stairs and Dr. Adams appears. He is the son of the man who once tended to me when I was a boy. I do not like to watch as he studies her, pulling at her eyelids, measuring her pulse, so I turn and stare into the flames. 447

‘It is a cold,’ Dr. Adams advises me, ‘but a deep one – I can sense its tendrils in her heart. Some lozenges will help, and Munyon’s Cold Cure.’

Just a cold. A relief. What is a cold but a piddling little thing? I go to Rachel’s side, tracing my forefinger down the length of her face, and tell her that I love her.