16

I hurried down the lane with a spring in my step, but slowed as I passed Prospect Cottage, remembering my bungled flower delivery earlier that morning. Glancing up towards the bedroom window, I thought I saw the top of my bouquet, just visible between the half-drawn curtains. I felt a flush of relief – that my second-hand tribute had at least been taken in; that Gordon had bothered to put the flowers in a vase – but I felt foolish, too, for having fled so fearfully. I really did need to grow up, I told myself, resolving to knock at the door on my way back and ask after the patient. Maybe Gordon would invite me in and I could satisfy myself that he was no Bluebeard; just an old curmudgeon who’d fallen out with his daughter. Such things happened, I reminded myself. Families were complicated – of that I was well aware – and thinking of the uneasy détente between Nick and Ethan, it was probably best not to rush to judgement – there but for the grace of God… I took a deep breath and strode on. Here was progress. Here was perspective. My psych would be proud of me. The clouds were beginning to part…

I galloped two at a time up the steps to Cath’s place and rapped smartly on the door. Despite its being after one, the house still seemed deep in slumber. Cath’s ginger tom, winding itself round my legs in expectation of food, seemed more confident of a response than I was. I had knocked and hallooed a few times and was on the point of giving up when a startled-looking face finally appeared at the downstairs window. She looked a wreck, her spiky white hair whorled into crop circles; her eyes like two gashes in a side of ham. It was obvious she had spent the night boozing or crying or both. I smiled, gestured, shrugged – unsure quite what message I was trying to convey, but when her face disappeared I took it for dismissal and had got halfway down the steps again before I heard the door open and her voice call hoarsely, ‘You’ll not bugger off now you’ve woke me!’

‘I was just heading off for a walk and I wondered if you wanted to…?’

She ordered me inside with a jerk of her head.

The place smelled like a shebeen. Sagging cushions and a rumpled blanket suggested she had spent the night on the sofa. Next to it on the coffee table stood an empty wine bottle, a large cut-glass ashtray brimming with fag ends and a wallet of colour photographs, a number of which were scattered across the floor. Making to follow her to the kitchen, I almost stepped on one and, picking it up, glimpsed a younger, slimmer, rather more handsome Cath standing with her arm around a smiley young woman in a red beanie, whose face, it took me a moment to realize, owed its indistinct babyishness to an absence of eyebrows and lashes. Even without those features Cath’s companion was lovely; dark eyes full of humour, chin tilted defiantly as if daring the camera to pity her. Cath’s demeanour, too, was staunchly cheerful; poignantly so, given what must have lain ahead for both of them. If love were enough to face down death, you would have given them good odds, seeing this photograph; but knowing that it had not been enough, knowing even a little of what followed, made my witnessing it feel all the more intrusive. I stuffed it guiltily back into the wallet and followed Cath through to the kitchen.

I found her scattering coffee grounds over the work surface as she attempted, with trembling hands and through a tobacco haze, to spoon it into the cafetière. The kitchen was in an even worse state of disarray than the living room had been. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes, empty bottles crowded the base of an erupting flip-top bin and a dish of rancid cat food was attracting a host of flies.

‘You know we don’t have to do this,’ I said, with a doubtful smile. ‘You can go back to bed and I’ll call in on my way ba—’

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ she interrupted fiercely, ‘you’ll have a coffee with me and then we’re going on that walk, if it bloody well kills me.’

At Cath’s suggestion, we took the westerly route up to the hill to avoid the dog-walkers whose cars tended to clog up the lane at weekends. Turning left at the track that ran beside the Gaineses’ walled garden, we negotiated a dilapidated stile and then began an arduous twenty-minute climb through the woods. For a while the only noises were our puffing and panting, the crunch of our feet over last year’s hazel shells and an occasional bout of phlegmy coughing from Cath. Despite the imminence of autumn, the canopy was still dense. Now and then, a shaft of light filtered through, highlighting an eruption of gorgeous purple fungus or a curiously shaped tree stump, and I remarked on them just to make conversation. As the woods became denser, however, such picturesque distractions were fewer, and the narrowing path and subfusc light seemed to confer an intimacy for which neither of us was quite prepared; our silence, broken only by the occasional snap of a twig underfoot, began to weigh heavy. Several times I opened my mouth to speak and then thought better of it.

‘She died four years ago yesterday,’ Cath said at last.

‘I’m so sorry.’

We trudged on for a bit.

‘I don’t suppose you want…? If it helps, you could tell me about her…’

So she did. They’d met on a walking holiday in Andalucía, to which Cath had forced herself to sign up after the break-up of a long-standing and destructive relationship.

‘It was either that or sit in my wee flat in London and drink myself to death,’ she said. I raised a meaningful eyebrow and she gave me a wry smile and continued. She’d been drawn to Annie straight away, she told me – her sunny disposition, her inventively foul mouth – but she had not looked on her ‘like that’, both because Cath was too bruised from her recent heartbreak and because Annie was coupled up. However, long-story-short, by the end of the holiday, the cracks in Annie’s relationship were beginning to show, Cath was utterly smitten and although not much more went on in Spain than meaningful looks, within a few months of returning, Annie’s ex was, well, Annie’s ex and she and Cath had moved in together.

‘When you know, you know,’ she said and I could only agree.

We walked on for a while in silence, our footfall prompting urgent rustlings in the undergrowth as various unseen creatures dived for cover.

‘So you knew, did you, with Nick…?’ Cath said.

I nodded ruefully.

‘It was like an illness,’ I said, ‘I didn’t recognize myself.’

I told her how we’d met, the cheesy chat-up, the cocktail, the kiss.

‘He rang every alarm bell going,’ I remembered with a grin.

‘And you ran towards the burning building,’ smiled Cath.

‘Yup.’

‘Worth it though…?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, emphatically, ‘we had Ethan for one thing…’

‘Of course, of course,’ Cath acknowledged, ‘and a lovely young man he seems too.’

Silence fell again, except for the crunch of our boots on the forest floor.

When we started speaking again, it was both of us at once.

‘It must have been awful for…’

‘Is he right for you, do you…?’

Nervous laughter.

‘Nick? Right for me?’ I pursed my lips and considered. ‘I don’t know that I ever really looked at it like that. I was too busy asking myself if I was right for him.’

Cath gave me a puzzled look.

‘Oh, come on. You only have to look at us,’ I chastised her. ‘Anyone can see I’m punching above my weight with Nick; when we first met, even more so. God, he was handsome. Still is, of course. But then! I mean, phwoar!’

‘So it’s physical?’ Cath said and I had to smile at her directness.

‘Not just physical, no,’ I replied. ‘I suppose…’

It made me squirm a little, trying to identify what it was.

‘It’s like… I don’t know… like, there’s a hole in me that only he can fill… oh God, that sounds rude…’ Cath gave a little frown of frustration. I was stalling and she knew it.

‘It’s like… if I’m with him, then I must be OK. He’s got all the credentials. You know, he’s smart and funny, he always knows what to do and what to say. And I never do. He’s a good dad…’

My voice trailed off as I wondered to myself if this last claim were true. He had certainly been a good dad to Gabe, but judged on the last few months, his relationship with Ethan had not, I supposed, been an unmitigated success; then again, nor had his relationship with me.

‘Well, I’m happy you’re happy…’ Cath nodded slowly and deliberately, ‘… except…’

‘What?’

She gave me a searching look.

‘You don’t seem that happy.’

I felt my face crumple.

‘Sorry,’ she said, before I could speak, ‘sorry… I shouldn’t have said that. Blame it on the skinful I had last night. Blame it on Annie.’

‘It’s OK,’ I said, trying to mask my distress with briskness, ‘you’re right. I’m not. Wasn’t anyway. We’ve had our troubles, Nick and I. He let me down… had an affair. Such a cliché.’

She raised her eyebrows inquisitively and I was about to go further when it occurred to me that this would be disloyal. ‘But he paid the price. Still is, really…’

‘How so?’

‘Oh well, all this…’ I waved my hand vaguely towards the trees, ‘… isn’t Nick. He’s no country bumpkin, but I think he thought it’d be good for me – the peace and quiet and the space and so forth. So he found us the cottage and made it all lovely and built me my studio, which I absolutely adore and he’s busting a gut to make me happy and you know, it does, it does make me happy, but it’s early days and I still have my moments…’

‘And what moments are those?’ Cath said gently. Suddenly I couldn’t speak.

I stopped and bit my lip. Tears filmed my eyes.

‘I have… gaps,’ I said, ‘absences. Times when I just zone out, or get muddled. You know, like the other night at Min and Ray’s…?’

‘Call that zoning out?’ Cath shook her head humorously. ‘You’re talking to the woman who just lost two days of her life to a bottle of Scotch!’

I smiled and looked a bit sheepish.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to trivialize what you went through… God, Annie used to hate me doing that. Why don’t you tell me? Tell me how it started. Tell me all about it.’

I shrugged, then began, haltingly at first.

‘I don’t know. I can barely remember the first time now. It was so… not me. But it was prompted by the…’ I tailed off, not wanting to sound histrionic, ‘… well, the trauma, I suppose you’d have to call it. When I found out Nick had been seeing… When things came to a head between us, it was all very sudden… I didn’t handle it well. I had a meltdown – went wild, got very destructive and then, well, it was kind of a blank after that…’

Cath nodded ruefully. I had never really been this honest with myself before, let alone with anyone else. Not even with the psych. I had felt too ashamed.

‘I suppose…’ I added haltingly, wondering if it were true even as I said it, ‘I suppose maybe I knew deep down that something would go wrong between us. The next thing I was in hospital, feeling as though I’d lost everything. They wouldn’t let Nick visit at first…’

Again, the beady look from Cath.

‘… Just because, you know, they needed to stabilize me, plus someone had to be at home for Ethan… poor kid didn’t know what was going on.’

Cath raised a sceptical eyebrow.

‘And of course Nick didn’t want to bring him until I was more recognizably his mother, because if he’d seen me how I was at first, well… it wasn’t good. But then because nobody came, I sort of got the wrong end of the stick and thought I was being punished and I just kind of checked out. Just sat and rocked and didn’t eat anything. And I didn’t even know I was doing it. That’s what I mean by blanking out. I mean… pathetic. So then they put me on these horse tranquilizers – you know, really heavy-duty antidepressants, and it was like being at the bottom of a fish tank. The days just blurred together and the food tasted of nothing and I was in la-la land. It was quite nice in a way because nothing felt real or connected, but I knew, I think, a little bit of me knew deep down that I had to be careful or I might not come back, which I didn’t care about for my sake, but I was worried about…

‘… Ethan,’ Cath murmured, ‘of course. Of course you were, hen.’

She bit her lip, as if such territory might not be unfamiliar to her and I felt a pang of shame that on this most painful of anniversaries, I was hogging the limelight.

‘Anyway,’ I gave a cheerful shrug, ‘it’s been much better lately. I hardly ever do it now, blank out, I mean. And as I say, Nick’s pulling out all the stops now, so…’

‘You’re off them now, are you?’ Cath said sternly. ‘The happy pills…?’

‘God yes!’ I said, laughing. ‘And so much better for it. Unrecognizable, really. Everybody says so. Just being here, where it’s quiet; where things are so much more relaxed – it’s done me the world of…’

My voice tailed off and our eyes met, hers full of kindly scepticism; mine hopeful, even a little desperate.

‘Well, that’s good to hear,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you up that hill so you can take your photies!’ and she folded my hand into the crook of her arm and, patting it consolingly, led me onward along the path.

We hadn’t been walking long before the woods began to thin and the path veered up a nettle-covered bank and out into sunlight. We clambered over another stile and by the time we had picked our way, with much slithering, swearing and arm-clutching, across the cattle-trodden bog that lay beyond it, our conversation had reverted to a cheerful but evasive prattle. The path divided now, one branch climbing steeply up the ridge, the other, little more than a goat track, dropping down to skirt its flank. I paused for a moment to allow Cath to catch up with me.

‘OK, Sherpa Tensing, ready for the north face?’ I said.

Her eyes followed mine to the top of the crag and she clutched her chest comically. I felt a pang of disappointment and then one of guilt for as much as she was making light of it, I knew there was no way she could climb a slope like that in her present state of health. Striking out onto the lower path, I muttered something about the views being just as good from there, but she overtook me and blocked my path, arms akimbo.

‘Oh no, you don’t,’ she said, ‘you’ll not wimp out on my account. Get yourself up that hill and take your snaps. I’ll meet you at the cattle trough by the lane. You can’t get off the hill without passing it, so we’ll not miss each other.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Are you sure?’ she repeated, mocking my mealy-mouthed Sassenach politeness, so that I swiped her arm and laughed and headed up the slope without a conscience, as she no doubt intended I should. Stopping once to catch my breath, I turned and watched her wend her way along the lower track, shoulders hunched, eyes cast down. She might as well have been wearing chainmail.

I struggled to the top of the ridge, grabbing at tussocks of grass to haul myself over the escarpment onto a wide and scrubby heath. The landscape up here was more rugged than the polite pastureland that surrounded our hamlet. No hedges, roads or rivers carved it up. No distant estuary drew the eye. I was on a hill besieged by other hills, their slopes clad not in picturesque deciduous woodland, but in close-ranked spruce and pine. Here and there, abandoned clay pits had bitten chunks out of the landscape, leaving scars of sand and scree. I circled slowly on the spot, taking it all in, feeling exhilaration mount in me, realising that I could throw pots for evermore and still not do justice to this scene, but knowing too that I would have to try. I fumbled with my camera-phone, setting it to video mode and accidentally recorded several short films of my own feet before finally getting the hang of it and taking a slow three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panning shot of the horizon. I followed that up with photographs: forty or fifty regular frames from different angles, and then a couple of panoramas. By the time I was done, my wrist was aching, my head spinning and the battery on my phone was in the red zone, but I had got what I came for.

I headed down again and it wasn’t long before I was back on familiar territory – the town in the distance, the church and the pub across the valley, hikers, picnickers and dog-walkers milling about on my hill as though it were Hampstead Heath. I could see Cath now, reclined on the lower slope near the cattle trough as she had promised. She was petting a large dog, wrestling its russet head playfully from side to side and looking up to converse with its owner, a skinny boy who reminded me of Ethan, who stood chatting to her with an air of awkward reluctance. She turned and gestured up the hill. I waved to her and she waved back and the boy looked in my direction and it was Ethan. I broke into a jog. The path narrowed and I stood to one side to allow a posse of elderly hikers to pass me and by the time I looked back again, Cath was alone.