13

Friday morning, in the early hours, he heard a bird singing loudly in the night.

John had no idea what kind it was, only that the song was extraordinary and seemed much louder because of the silence of the dark. It was in a tree somewhere close to the house, and the song was a true melody. Lying flat on his back, he had been awake for more than an hour. There was no way that he could sleep.

He had met Catherine the previous evening in a local pub, a small place in the next village. Over the meal, the conversation predictably turned to Richard Dadd.

“I wrote a book about him,” Catherine said.

“Did you?” he replied. “I’m sorry, I should have known that.”

She shrugged. “I don’t see why,” she told him. “It wasn’t exactly a bestseller. It sold about three copies.”

“You’re being modest.”

“I’m not,” she retorted. “I produced it when there was a retrospective for him. OK, it sold a few while the exhibition was on, but after that not many.”

“I’d like to read it.”

“It’s more about the paintings than Bedlam or Broadmoor.”

“So much the better.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I rarely meet anyone who’s even heard of him.”

“Do you have a copy I can borrow?”

“Yes, I …” She paused, frowning slightly.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I have several,” she said. “But I think Robert took one.”

“He did?”

“There’s a gap in the bookshelf. I’m sure it was my book.”

“Is it so surprising that he should take a copy?” John asked.

She laughed faintly. “Yes,” she said. “He thought Dadd was grotesque.”

“Well, so he could be.”

“Yes, but …” She lifted a hand to her face. “Robert thought it was all pretty much a waste of time.”

“Just Dadd?”

“Art generally.”

John frowned. “That is a lot of your life not to have in common.”

“He wasn’t obstructive about it,” Catherine said.

“Nevertheless.”

She had finished her food and put her knife and fork down slowly. “I met Robert when I first moved to London, straight out of college,” she said. “Waiting for a train, actually.”

“You were working there?”

“Yes. For an auction house. A little bigger than Pearsons.” She smiled, then glanced away. “Though it wasn’t a very nice time overall.”

“Any particular reason?” he asked.

She paused for quite a long time. “Well … my parents had died a year before,” she said. “A car accident.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. He waited for some other detail, but none came. “In London?”

“No,” she said. “They worked all over the place. They were in Africa at the time.” He watched her hand describe slow circles on the tabletop, pursuing the grain of the oak in the surface. “There was another car following them, they were on a dirt track. The driver behind—they were in a convoy of three—said that the car flipped so slowly, and landed so gently, that he was sure they would both be OK. But they weren’t. My father was killed instantly.”

He waited, trying to read her face. “Are you an only child?”

“Yes,” she said. “Are you?”

“No,” he replied. “I have a sister, Helen. She’s younger than I am and she lives in London.”

“Do you see much of her?”

He shook his head. “Actually, I haven’t seen her for some time,” he said. “She … she’s very busy. She works in television.”

“Oh,” Catherine said. “As an actress?”

“No. She’s a designer. I think the last thing she worked on was Byzantium.”

He had named a well-known historical series that had come high in the year’s ratings. Catherine nodded, impressed. “And she would … do what on that?”

“Come up with the concept of how it looked, the locations, the overall tone. Working with the director.”

“But that’s an amazing job,” Catherine said. “She must be a very interesting person.”

“Yes,” he said finally. He did not want to talk about Helen, or what she represented to him. “She is quite interesting.” He hoped she could not hear the irony in his voice.

The waitress came; they looked at the menu and ordered coffee.

Catherine glanced around the bar and back at him; then she ran her hand briefly over her face before resting her head on the same hand.

He gazed at her. He had been drawn to her earlier in the day, felt overwhelmed by the sensation of her in his arms; but something far more powerful, far more basic, took hold of him now. He looked at her hand, at the shape of it, at the smooth texture of her skin, at the shape of the fingers and the angle of the wrist, and suddenly wanted her. It took the strength out of him. He wanted to feel her skin; he wanted his mouth on her. He crossed his arms over his chest as if to hold the feeling in.

She was not looking at him directly now; she had been gazing for a second at the people at another table. Then she turned back to him. “How long were you and Claire married?” she asked.

“Four years.”

“And was there someone in Spain?”

“In Spain?” he asked. “No.”

“That’s a very long time to be on your own.”

He didn’t reply. He felt Claire somewhere at the back of his mind, where she had been for the last two or three years. She had finally retreated out of his daily consciousness, which at first made him feel guilty, and then, slowly, saddened and relieved. She lived there, halfway to forgetting, an icon of what it was to be loved now, rather than a woman of flesh and blood. He would concentrate on her from time to time with a kind of two-dimensional longing. She was no longer living in his mind but, rather, reproduced there.

He realized that Catherine was watching him with a curious expression on her face. “I saw them afterward,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “Saw who?”

She blushed slightly, made a slight face to herself, as if she had said something embarrassing, out of place. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Saw who?” he repeated.

She bit her lip. “Did you ever see Claire?” she asked.

He looked hard at her. He thought of the dream and the footprints. “I saw where she had walked,” he said, quietly. “The imprint.”

There was a perfect silence for a moment. She did not say, as he had half expected her to say, some placatory thing, that it was perhaps some kind of hallucination, some false memory. She accepted it; she nodded.

“They were in my room,” she explained, simply. “About a week after the funeral.” She sat back in her chair, her hands folded in her lap. Her face was calm, thoughtful rather than unhappy. “I came upstairs,” she continued. “It was early in the year and got dark early. I hadn’t put on the light, and I walked into my bedroom and saw them. I saw them standing …” She stopped.

“In the room?”

She frowned. “It was very odd,” she said. “I don’t mean just the fact of seeing them at all. But they were standing on either side of my bed, very straight, very still. And at the time I didn’t think, How peculiar that you’re here. That was the strangest part. I didn’t think that at all, or anything like it. I just wondered why they said nothing. They were like sentries on either side of the bed.” She crossed her arms. “I put on the light,” she said. “And they stayed. They stayed for three or four seconds. I saw the light on their clothes, the colors come up after the shadows. I saw the color of my mother’s hair. I saw the ring she always had on her thumb, too large to wear on her finger, an African ring.”

John listened, thinking of the distinctness of Claire’s footsteps in his recurring dream in Alora, and how they had lived with him, how he sometimes thought that he saw them when he was awake, and how he accepted their presence unreservedly. “Did it frighten you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But I kept seeing the amber in the ring. It was amber in a thick silver setting, with a kind of hatched pattern in the silver. Do you know a painting called The Last Chapter? By Martineau.”

“No,” he said.

“Oh, well,” she smiled. “It doesn’t really matter. But I had a print of that. It’s a wonderful painting for the firelight; a girl is reading a book with only the light of the fire, and …” Her voice trailed off for a second. “But she’s wearing a sash, with a hatched, a crisscross pattern … the two stuck together, the colors of their clothes, the painting, the patterns. And sometimes Dadd did that kind of shading. I would glimpse that design, a sort of echo, when I was doing other things. Working, or sitting on a bus, or …” She shrugged a little. “I was crazy, I suppose.”

“No,” he told her. “That kind of crazy is sane. A repeating pattern, running through everywhere you look.” And he thought of particular designs he had done after Claire’s death, ones where he inadvertently used drawings she had made for a costume, the cut or angle of a shape. How it came out in everything. How everything was linked. Paintings, shade, shape, memory, feelings: longing or desire or preoccupation. How satisfying it was to draw the line and find that it linked two disparate objects in your mind.

They lapsed into silence and he paid the bill. After another couple of minutes, they went out of the pub together. Crossing the parking lot, they paused by his car.

“Thank you for the meal,” she said. She was holding her own car keys in her hand.

“You’re very welcome.”

“Have you finished the work on the river now?” she asked. “The stream?”

“For now,” he said. He looked at the keys in her hand. “Would you like to walk down to the bridge?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said, and put the keys in her pocket.

The village street was very quiet. Only one car passed them as they walked downhill, the long gentle slope to the eighteenth-century bridge that John had seen almost swamped by the floodwaters earlier in the year. It was a narrow bridge with two small niches on both sides halfway across, so that pedestrians might avoid the road traffic.

They stood here now, looking at the water meadows on one side and the river on the other. Two or three hundred yards out in the meadows were blurred white shapes.

“Can you see them?” Catherine asked. “The swans.”

And so they were. Three pairs, heads dipped into the short grass, so that they presented curious shallow figures, almost horizontal. Six white ghostlike boats moving across the dark canvas of the fields. They might have been invisible altogether if it hadn’t been for the moon.

He took Catherine’s hand and crossed the little road, then stepped down onto the riverside path, a very narrow chalk path under the trees.

Two tributaries joined here: there was a wide, rushy gap of water and a few feet of gravelly shore. On each bank, trees dipped down to the river. He knew that behind him, the land stretched away to the foot of Derry Woods, though nothing could be seen of the woods now.

In fact, he could see nothing at all but the shadows of the trees and the lazy movement of the river, a slow dance where the waters merged, breaking up the reflection of the moonlight.

He realized that Catherine had stopped and was staring at the water.

“What is it?” he asked.

She stayed where she was. “I’ve been waiting for them to come back,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for my mother’s hand.” She shook her head.

He drew her arm so that it locked behind his back. She said nothing, but turned in toward him. If he could have heard her thoughts, he would have heard her longing for him, the rush of desire, the electricity she felt when he touched her. But he could barely see her face, though he saw the lightness of her skin, the fall of her hair on her shoulders.

“They won’t need to,” he whispered. “I’ll stand with you now.”

She remained still for a second, and then put her head in the crook of his shoulder. There was nothing but the whispering of the river, the black-and-white photographic print of water and trees, so distinct in its contrasts that it was almost abstract.

They were part of a pattern, a ribbon of light and dark. He felt the world fragment, move and alter. He felt a change, a rush, a disorientation. He shifted his balance to hold her closer, pressing his mouth to her neck, her face. She tilted her head, returned the pressure of his touch. He lifted her free hand and pressed it to his mouth, then turned the palm over and ran his lips from fingertip to wrist.

He heard her intake of breath. She put her arm around his neck, tightened the embrace in the small of his back. What he saw in his mind was the light on the water; the moonlight breaking and rejoining, breaking and rejoining, as the water rolled past them, under the wide span of the arches and beyond the bridge.

John turned on his side in the bed now and felt the faint trickle of cold air from the open window. The bird had stopped singing; the silence it left was almost tangible. He listened for a while, hoping for a long time that it would continue, then turned back.

Catherine was lying at his side, asleep, her head turned down into the pillow so that he could not see her face.

Tentatively, he reached out and touched her, felt her warmth.

And, for the first time in years, certainly for the first time without grief, and despite himself, he cried, quietly and steadily in the dark, with his hand in hers.