RICHARD HAD SHUT up the Abe episode in a box that he was determined never to open. As a husband and a Christian, he was appalled at what had happened, but the part of him that was pure Epworth pragmatist considered that the best way to deal with the encounter was to vow that it would never happen again and forget about it. This worked for a week or so, but through February and March, different breaches occurred in Richard’s defences, old memories and new fantasies. Richard could hardly distinguish them. Their comfort as mental relief was compromised by his inability to control them. Abe, or men resembling Abe, walked into his thoughts: young men with springy hair and an easy way of talking. Then there was more to control, because the spectres also had to be extinguished. After the family returned home from skiing, Richard avoided the guest bedroom where he and Abe had slept – though sometimes all he wanted to do was to go in and lie quietly on the bed.
There were layers of permission in his fantasies that were like interleaves. Richard came across them: thin, almost opaque, sheets between one page of his thoughts and the next. To steady himself, he kept returning to the weather on that January evening. Epworths could cope with weather. But the topic blew itself out and he moved on to the chance encounter, the way Abe had arrived at his house. It had been simple but also complicated – like a dream mixed up with a weird mathematical probability problem. What was the likelihood of something like that happening? The timing soothed him – the way the flow had created itself. He remembered Abe’s careless questions about the girls, and his own anxious queasiness as he heard them spoken of. He had replied to the questions. The queasiness passed. His best memory was of Abe, in the darkness of the taxi, with his hands clasped behind the back of his head, his legs stretching across the taxi floor – the posture of businessmen when feigning contemplation.
Richard had taken the sheets to the express laundry. He had checked and rechecked the guest bedroom and bathroom – believing that he was bound either to have missed or created some domestic discrepancy that Vivienne would home in on. On the correct day he turned up at Heathrow Airport, joining the po-faced men behind the rope at Arrivals who were carrying boards or makeshift notices bearing wonkily inscribed names. He scanned the incoming passengers emerging from the Customs Hall and saw his wife and daughters before they saw him. In that split second he panicked at not being recognised – afraid that he had turned into a stranger. Then the girls started grinning and waving. They came running towards him. Vivienne, tussling with the luggage on wheels, finally noticed him. By the time she reached him and he was hugging her, he had forgotten the blank look on her face that suggested he might not have been her husband.
His blunder, it turned out, had been failing to take down the Christmas decorations. He had got into trouble for that – past Twelfth Night, past Epiphany. Vivienne had said that they had never left Christmas decorations up beyond the due date. Richard claimed that he had lived entirely in the kitchen and the bedroom while she and the girls were away. He said he had forgotten to go into the other rooms. Vivienne had nodded, as if she believed him, but it was clear that she felt exposed. To what, Richard wasn’t quite sure. Bad luck didn’t come into it. Or good luck. In the circumstances he felt unable to press the point. He looked on while Vivienne stripped the dried-up tree. First the decorations, then the lights, which she unwound, beginning at the top, until she had a tangle of green wire and tiny bulbs festooned round one arm. A pile of crisp pine needles collected on the floor and yet more fell into the decorations box, which had once contained the computer printer and still bore its name and outline on the side. Having pulled the plug from the socket, Vivienne placed the tangle in the top of the box and pushed down the flaps. Richard had closed his ears to the possible scrunch. Vivienne had looked up at him rather defiantly and said that if it turned out that the lights had shattered, they would simply have to go to John Lewis next December and buy new.
Several times Richard came close to dialling the mobile number Abe had given him and which he had committed to memory. He had looked at it often enough to have it by heart. He wanted to hear Abe’s voice – the deadpan delivery that suddenly activated. The thought of Abe answering the phone in person stopped him. Since he hadn’t made the call, what did ‘coming close to’ mean? He could make no sense of the words that he used to describe his unguarded intentions; it pained him to use them.
So far, his work hadn’t been affected but weariness, free time, ordinary days at home laid him open. Richard valued his family. For him it came first. Fractures to his contentment, during the twelve years of his marriage, had been infrequent; caused by a look, a touch that changed the rhythm of his thoughts. He had never acted on the strange uneasiness that came over him, so there was nothing to remind him once the moment had passed. The notion of Men Seeking Men in the personal columns, or by any other means, was as alien to him as the equivalent Men Seeking Women. He disapproved of affairs between married men and their secretaries, or female colleagues, and he would have disapproved of an affair between a married man and another man even more, if he had heard of such a thing in the office. He wasn’t, and never had been, on the lookout. It was as if he were on a bridge which he knew to be safe, well above the waterline, when, for no reason that he could understand or predict, he felt the bridge breaking. Until meeting Abe he had held steady.
On the afternoon of Easter Monday Richard drove up to Harrow-on-the-Hill to drop off Bethany and Martha at a birthday party. The village, as people called it, was only a mile or so away from where the Epworths lived but, apart from delivering the girls to social events, Richard had little reason to go there. He hadn’t been for over a year; certainly not since January.
Richard knew that he had reached the right house when he saw the red and orange balloons attached to the gatepost, the 4x4s, pavement-parked, and children clambering down from them. He let the girls out of the car and they ran across the gravelled drive and in through a door with a fanlight above it. Decent-sized family houses ‘on-the-Hill’ were out of his price bracket, which was why he and Vivienne had ended up with a less desirable postcode, off Sudbury Hill, in one of the new executive homes that backed on to the grounds of a private hospital. Compared with some of his colleagues in the City, his income was modest. He never got the huge bonuses. No one did in his department. It was a backwater that had, so far, escaped being the focus of an initiative.
As he had taken no exercise at all on Easter Day and was still feeling thick-headed from Paula’s lunch, Richard decided that rather than drive home and set out again later he would go for a walk. Having manoeuvred the car into a proper parking space, he left a message for Vivienne, explaining what he was doing, then switched off his phone. He got out and locked the car door. He looked up and down the street as he inserted coins in the meter. There was a woman on a bicycle and a man with a dog; no one he recognised. Meeting anyone by chance always gave Richard a jolt – like the time he had met a colleague’s secretary, Tricia, at the customer services desk at the Marks and Spencer at Finsbury Pavement and had suddenly found himself explaining why he was returning the pack of socks in his hand. Turning a corner and coming across Abe would have immobilised him. He would have felt an agonising level of embarrassment and come out with some idiotic remark. No, he wasn’t expecting to meet Abe.
Richard walked down the high street, pausing to look at the headless models in the window of the school outfitter’s. They posed against wood panels, in their blazers and trousers, rugby shirts and shorts – personifications of right conduct that wouldn’t last once they got a boy inside them. The atmosphere of Harrow had always seemed to him stifling, in spite of its airy position. The inescapable school buildings – the aesthetic mix of guest house and nineteenth-century town prison – made the village feel enclosed.
Abe and Kirsty’s living arrangements had charmed him – the anachronism. The old-fashioned house share with a sibling and the unapologetic way Abe had announced it meant a lot to him. People sometimes go back to live with their parents but not many join up with a brother or sister for a second bout. It had been good to discover that not everyone in their twenties conformed to the same pattern – Richard had lagged behind himself, in various departments, at that age. His choice of music, films and clothes had been dull. Sub-optimal. Only his willingness to learn – and please – had saved him. And then, once he was married, Vivienne’s good taste and influence.
Richard guessed that Kirsty must be a good earner, probably older than Abe and generous enough to give her brother a helping hand financially. Even so, their house must be small – two and a half beds at the most – because property prices in the village were high. He wondered what Kirsty looked like and if he would see enough family resemblance to know her if he passed her in the street. Remembering the mother’s peculiar Egyptian hobby, he somehow imagined the daughter as black-haired and carefully made up around the eyes. Richard allowed himself a few uncomplicated pictures of Abe: happy ones, different from the troubling images that plagued him at home. They were like old-style holiday snaps. Abe in a thick jersey wearing his beanie hat and balancing an upturned broom on the flat of his hand. Abe shaking the snow from the silver fir tree under a bright blue sky – cheery snow scenes pictures. They were set in his garden and had never happened. These thoughts went round his head, about Abe and the sister, but somehow missing the point – skirting round his awkward feelings of longing and guilt. He caught sight of himself in the glass of another shop, a middle-aged man wearing pale jeans and a dark shirt; dressed down for bank holiday, lacking the usual weekday suit.
Richard climbed up to the churchyard and self-consciously admired the view, then, taking a steep footpath down again, he headed for the quiet residential roads on the western slope of the hill where the houses were more modest. He was enjoying his walk. He told himself that the advantages of building on a hill are the changes of level: unexpected juxtapositions, roofs and chimneys below, front gardens looking up. This was as true in Harrow as in Tuscany. He concentrated on outward things. Richard made no claims to possessing an artist’s eye, but today he appreciated the way buildings fitted together. His instinct, when going along a street, was to estimate property prices to the nearest five thousand pounds. He made the usual appraisal now but, with time on his hands, he went on to look in a less mercantile way – at houses through windows. He imagined the inhabitants and paid attention to the faces he passed. He realised what little notice he took of his own neighbourhood – getting into the car, pulling out of the drive – and why Vivienne was sometimes incredulous at his inadequate observation.
As Richard walked along, the motion of his steps and the shafts of weak sunshine that appeared between the roofs put him in good spirits. He felt less rushed than for weeks and seemed to be acquiring another, calmer identity. He imagined returning to the Hill on future occasions. He decided that whenever the girls needed to be ferried to parties or French club he would drop them off, drive over to Harrow, park the car on the lower slopes, where he wouldn’t be clamped, and have a wander around until it was time to collect them. He might try one of the pubs for a pint of beer, or even have a haircut.
He was passing a row of flat-fronted Victorian cottages when an old fellow with a walking stick addressed him. ‘Rain’s holding off for you,’ he said. Richard agreed. He was pleased to be greeted. A few minutes later he heard a woman singing. It was an unselfconscious, private sound and came from inside one of the cottages. The song was unaccompanied – perfect to his ears. Richard didn’t slow down. He went on to the end of the road, then retraced his steps. The singing had stopped by the time he returned. Richard scanned the front of the cottage – only two storeys high, he could take it in at a glance. Number twelve was similar to the others in the street; built of yellow London stock bricks with three windows – all open, two up, one down – and a solid-looking front door. There was a bicycle and a wheelie bin in the narrow front yard. A solitary pot containing a small shrub, tipped with brown leaves, stood by the path. The gate was broken, tied to its hinges by a piece of wire. In the window of the front room was a stone cat, tall and regal, Egyptian-looking, even with its back turned. Its ears strained upwards, as if tracking a flock of birds flying overhead. Seeing the cat, Richard flinched, as if he’d been slapped round the head. His shirt went damp under his arms and across his back.
He walked down the hill and made his way to the car. He unlocked the door and almost crawled into the driver’s seat. He felt contained sitting there, soothed by the familiar smell of the leather seats, the arrangement of the dashboard, the leftover twirl of paper from a roll of Extra Strong Mints in the dip between the two front seats. He was aware that the association of singing and a stone cat was random, and that there was nothing logical or causal linking them. The overwhelming feeling that he was standing in front of Abe’s house had come more from his pulse – which was only now slowing down – and a buzzing in his brain, than from any rational explanation. He didn’t move until a traffic warden tapped on the window and pointed at the meter. Then he nodded, put on his seat belt, turned the key in the ignition and drove away.
Julian’s mother was very understanding when Richard turned up nearly half an hour after the party had ended. All the other children had already been collected. Richard apologised and Julian’s mother went to call the girls. The hall he waited in was splendid, like the entrance to a house people pay to look around. The paintings were lit with individual lights in the form of brass shells, and the walls were covered in some silky cloth. He stood and gaped, at a loss without a ticket. At a loss altogether. Bethany and Martha were watching a DVD, finishing the birthday cake. Julian’s mother hurried them out, ignoring the crumbs that they shed as they ran across the huge Chinese rug. No one made Julian come and say goodbye. He was said to be upstairs getting into his combats, preparing to go to the RAF museum at Hendon for the birthday treat.