THE HIGH STREET of Harrow-on-the-Hill was full of returning boys and the traffic at a standstill. Richard had failed to take account of the new summer term. He put his arm across the back of the passenger seat and looked out of the rear window. Another car was already behind, tight on his bumper. The woman at the wheel smiled complacently. Bethany caught Richard’s eye. ‘How did we get in this mess?’ she asked.
‘We were moving. Then everything stopped,’ Richard said.
‘Stop bloody hooting!’ Bethany shouted to the car next to them. ‘You’re giving me a headache.’
‘Quiet, please,’ Richard said.
In the wing mirror, Richard could see Martha put her hands over her shoulders and pull at the two ends of a silk scarf that Frances had lent her. ‘Jacquard,’ Frances had said it was. Martha had liked the word. Her face was nearly hidden. She caught her breath as the cloth pressed against her windpipe.
‘Careful, Martha,’ Richard warned.
Richard glimpsed his younger daughter, lifting her face in the direction of the mirror, examining individual strands of loose hair against the light and tucking them into the scarf.
Everyone was beeping, for no known reason – more for general jollity. The sun was out for the first time in weeks and the colours were as clear as the Japanese paper flowers the girls floated in water. Cars were parked and double parked, and parents clung on to their vehicles as if fastened to outcrops on a rock face. They obstructed the road. Boys carelessly left the grown-ups and formed in groups. ‘Goodbye, George.’ ‘Goodbye Ollie.’ ‘We can’t leave the car, darling.’ The boys weren’t interested in saying goodbye. Traffic from the right was now looping round in front of Richard’s car. People carriers nudged up close, their windscreens like menacing, oversized spectacles. The beeping carried on, expressing nothing more than stupidity past a certain point. Richard and his daughters waited as if they had suddenly become good at waiting – turned in on themselves – listening to the regular cheeps of Martha sucking her thumb. Eventually a key player shifted and the vehicles started to move.
Richard steered round the obstacles and wound a path down the hill, past an unbroken line of parked cars. He turned into the tennis club car park and found a space at the far end of the tarmac. ‘We’ve made it, girls,’ he said.
He accompanied Bethany and Martha to the changing pavilion, then walked back to the road. He had forgotten that tennis was starting up again. Vivienne had had to remind him. There it was on the noticeboard; Saturday mornings at nine o’clock. Richard had felt unable to refuse to chauffeur the girls, on the grounds that tennis was in Harrow. It had seemed ridiculous to make an excuse. He had made a simple resolution to keep away from Abe’s road. That, he hoped, would do the trick.
Richard turned to look through the chicken wire fence at the children lining up, his own two among them. The air shone. Even the shadows were bright. Another summer beginning, he thought. He was bothered by the ‘having to make the most of’ that didn’t colour the other seasons. ‘Hang on,’ he wanted to say. ‘I’m not ready for this.’ Other people seemed not to be affected, certainly not his daughters. They simply enjoyed themselves, full of high spirits to be out of doors with their arms and legs bare. His own dark-blue shirt seemed unseasonal. He rolled up the sleeves, turning the cloth over and over and exposing his pale forearms. The girls appeared tiny in the distance across three tennis courts. They were too far away for them to see him wave unless they were watching out for him – little figures wearing shorts and T-shirts and white tennis shoes, sunhats, too, because the day would be hot. Richard waved all the same, before turning away. He walked up the hill to the high street and went into a café.
The long room was crowded; heavy with the fatty smell of reheated croissants. At first there appeared to be no boundaries between the people who occupied the space, nor between their furious talking, but as Richard wandered around trying to find a spare seat, his eyes separated out groups who were more or less facing each other across coffee cups and plates of scattered crumbs. He found a way between them, stepping over the bulky feet of sprawling, overgrown boys, and made for an alcove off the main room into which two tiny tables had been squashed. A couple occupied one but the other was free. Richard lowered his head, brushed aside some overhanging greenery and sat down on a small iron chair. The noise in the bower was less strident. He pulled out his newspaper and opened it at the point he had stopped reading at breakfast, folding back the pages until they made a neat rectangle. As he flattened the newspaper on the table, he noticed the woman across to his right, staring into her empty coffee cup, stabbing her teaspoon into it as if she were stubbing out a cigarette. His eyes were drawn to the gesture and the force that the woman put into it.
‘I tried not to call you,’ she said.
Her companion said nothing.
‘I tried. But . . . it didn’t work.’ The grinding on the bottom of the coffee cup began again.
The man remained silent.
‘It’s been difficult,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Richard saw the man lean across the table and reach for the spoon. He took it from the woman’s slim fingers with his larger ones and laid it in the saucer.
‘I needed to see you,’ the woman said. ‘Not to do anything. Just to see you – to ground this whole thing.’ She hesitated. She was swilling the dregs of coffee around in her cup as if it were good claret. ‘Three weeks ago. I managed three weeks.’
A girl wearing a checked waistcoat and a full-length apron entered the alcove. ‘Would you like another of those?’ she asked.
‘No,’ the man said. ‘Thank you,’ he added. The girl had already turned to Richard. She was standing over him, pulling on a piece of hair that covered one eye.
‘I’ll have a cappuccino, please,’ Richard said.
‘Any food? Panini with char-grilled peppers, spring rolls in lemon dip, couscous salad, mini pizza selection.’
‘No, thanks,’ Richard said. ‘Just coffee.’
The girl walked away. The arrangement of the short skirt showing in the inverted V of the apron made her look oddly geriatric, as if she had forgotten to pull down her dress after using the toilet. Richard’s neighbours had fallen silent. The woman kept looking at the man. Her eyes weren’t steady; it was as if fast-moving clouds passed across them. Richard was disturbed to be sitting so close – a non-participating third in this exchange, which was somehow inappropriate for the time of day. Seduction was turned inside out, showing the way it had been stitched together and the crude form of construction. Richard was alarmed by the woman’s intensity, the negative energy that she sent in gusts across the table. It affected him, who was nothing to do with the situation. He wondered, since it was the beginning of term, whether the couple were parents of different returning boys. They were the right sort of age. But he didn’t like to speculate on other people’s personal business; it made him uncomfortable, as if conjecture was participating in a lie. He wished the girl with the apron would return. When his coffee arrived he drank it too quickly, scalding his mouth.
Richard left the café, leaving the correct money on the table. He walked along the high street towards the churchyard, drawn to the shadows which, from a distance, appeared green, underneath the canopy of new leaves. He thought of Bethany and Martha – what complications of relationship they might get caught in. He longed for them to be happy. Bethany would remain bold, he hoped, able to say what she wanted. He and Vivienne weren’t always good at that. And Martha? He smiled, remembering her in her usual state of undress, tearing across Paula’s lawn on Easter Day.
Once inside the churchyard, Richard went along the footpaths, careful of the uneven ground. Some of the old graves pushed the earth up and some fell into it, taking the lie of the path with them. There were too many trees and tombs, too many secret corners, to achieve a clear line of vision, but Richard sensed that the place was empty of boys and parents, visitors of any kind. A gardener was tidying up, only just visible, camouflaged by the leaf shadow pattern on his back. He was using a broom and a hoe, setting them aside every now and then to bend and tug at a misplaced weed or root with his bare hands. He would be there again next day, or next week, to pull up the replacements. Richard skirted round the man, envying the diligence and the repetitive actions. He trod cautiously, though the gardener was too absorbed to notice him. Richard went into the church porch and unlatched the door. The smell of old stone and old books seeped out as he edged the door open. Once inside, he had to put weight against the heavy wood to heave it shut.
The church was pleasantly cool. Richard crossed the aisle and sat down in a pew. He checked his watch. Half an hour remained before he had to return to the tennis courts. He felt secure here, out of the way. He wasn’t going to pray. Praying was the wrong activity, a lonely occupation – too agitating without the presence of other praying people – not just stirring up thoughts of his own that were better left undisturbed but spoiling this Saturday peace. He wanted peace. If he asked God for help, he would need to bring to mind why he needed it and then he’d be back on the compulsive journey that looped back on itself. He sat silently, closed off from within and without, as if underwater.
There were voices outside in the porch. A man talking, perhaps addressing the gardener. Reluctantly, Richard stood up, brushed his knees from habit and walked to the end of the pew. He went towards the north door, which wasn’t in use, and examined the memorial to its left – a woman lying draped over a tomb, her head concealed, some curled locks of hair escaping over her left arm. Richard bent and looked at the words carved beneath to find out who she was. John Henry North, he read, Judge of the Admiralty – Ireland. Honoured, Revered, Admired, Beloved, Deplored by the Irish Bar, the Senate and his County. The text continued at some length. For a second Richard was taken aback to read a man’s name. Then he remembered the displacement, common in tombs and memorials; the depiction, not of the deceased, but of grief itself – or the grieving spouse. The dead had the script, the bereft were dumb.
Richard himself had been dumb at the crematorium in Essex where Jamie’s funeral had taken place. He hadn’t opened his mouth. There had been no hymns and no communal prayers – nothing to join in with. Music was played on the sound system and strangers got up to speak. The chapel had been packed. People were crammed into the pews and others, including Richard himself, were standing at the back. The family, dressed in black party clothes, had occupied the front, no doubt with Jamie’s half-sisters among them. Richard had no way of knowing who was who and had been too stunned to start guessing. At the end of the service the doors had been opened by an attendant and Richard had gone outside before the traditional peeling off from the front began. He stepped off the tarmac where the cars of the next funeral were waiting, on to a wide gravel path. The air was still damp from an early-morning downpour. There was a metal gate at the far end of the path, flanked by conifers, and he kept walking towards it through pools of water that hadn’t yet drained away. The printed service sheet was in his pocket. He had no recall of what was written on it. Neither music nor words were what had bound him and Jamie together. ‘Are you asleep?’ Richard used to say in the night, having dozed and woken. ‘Not any more,’ Jamie replied. The quietest part of the night was the best for Richard. Then he forgot himself. He was frightened by what had bound him to Jamie and by its vanishing.
Somewhere, on the way back to London from Essex, Richard lost the printed sheet – of all things to lose. He couldn’t understand what had happened to it. He had shown his ticket on the train, bought another ticket for the tube, let himself in with his door key. He had gone through his pockets again and again. His feet were sopping wet.
The door on the other side of the church creaked open. The sunlight came in, making a path that extended beyond where Richard was standing; a tapering wedge of bright dust. He heard footsteps, habituated and purposeful, going towards the east end of the church. He waited until they were safely away, then he turned and made for the exit.
Setting off back down the hill to the car, Richard took the same route that he had taken to come up, only in reverse; that is, avoiding Abe’s road. The houses he passed were large, red-brick, tile-hung, with complicated chimneys and excrescences. The plots around them were deep and the tall trees, as old as the buildings, hid the smaller houses that lay behind. Possibly, in winter, odd rooftop shapes emerged between the branches, but at this time of year new leaves were growing, expanding by the hour, filling the gaps. The proximity of the next road only a hundred or so metres away – and the fact that this was the end of Richard’s Saturday excursion, not the beginning – caused a kind of diffused anguish in him, which grew worse with every step.
Richard remembered every detail of Abe’s house. He was still preoccupied by having discovered it. An address was almost as impersonal as a telephone number but a house that he had stood in front of, and could call to mind, had substance. Seeing the cottage with the blue door and the broken gate had been, in an odd way, like meeting Abe for a second time. He could place him. Richard had to admit that he had been reassured by the look of the exterior, its innate respectability. There had been moments since January when he had wondered whom exactly he had brought home with him. He was in no doubt of the wrongness of what he had done, but he had been troubled also by a lack of judgement of another kind and of the risk he had taken.
Richard guessed that the couple in the café had known each other for a while – longer than a night. No one would make such heavy weather of a single night. On the scale between fantasy and reality, it was hard to know where to place such a small unit of time. Richard put it nearer fantasy but he wasn’t certain. He tried not to think of Abe. People fell over themselves to help you improve your memory, prepared to sell you books, lectures, vitamins, sticky notes, gingko biloba. There was the man in the ad who would teach you to remember if you sent him a cheque. The pen-and-ink sketch of his face had appeared in the newspapers, unchanged, since Richard’s childhood. But forgetting was just as much of an art. Richard wished, for present use, that he had retained more knowledge of the period following Jamie’s death – that he had paid more attention to the signs of recovery along the way. He imagined that, had he kept some sort of diary, progress would have appeared in the entries – in the words themselves – showing how, on given dates, he had re-entered the everyday world. But there was no diary. He hadn’t had the concentration to write and besides, the idea of fixing those weeks would have been hateful to him.
Richard’s awareness of his surroundings and of the fine weather had gone. The strengthening heat was making him tense. He took his handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and rubbed it over his face. In his mind he was going down a parallel road. In this case, literally, the parallel road, and imagining he was on it, telling himself that he could have been on it and might as well be there. He walked more and more slowly, like a machine winding down, and eventually came to a halt. A dog in a nearby house started yapping and jumping up at the window, maddened by the stranger who lingered by his territory. The yapping became more frantic and the dog hurled itself at the glass. Richard started walking again, back up the hill. He seemed to be heading all the way to the top. But there was an unmade-up lane to the right which cut through to the next street. Richard took it and emerged in Abe’s road.