Twenty-Two

Kieran watched Theo run down the Priory’s long garden. Dressed in a faded red T-shirt, cut-off jeans and too-large Timberland boots, the boy left a dark trail in the dew of the early-morning grass. Ahead of him scooted one of the village cats, tail raised in alarm. Kieran, standing at the kitchen door, looked up at the sunlight on the east-facing hill of the valley, marking its slope in spectacular green-and-white ridges. Hamble monument was a brilliant chalk-white.

Theo ran down to the hedge gate and climbed it. His back was revealed as a patch of exposed white between shorts and shirt, as the boy leaned over the top of the gate and spread his arms, still calling to the cat. Beyond the gate, two dirty-looking little horses with matted manes and tails grazed the field. Theo tipped his head back and stared at the sky in a posture of unencumbered freedom and curiosity.

Kieran looked away. He had been trying to get Theo to eat breakfast. He hadn’t known what to do when his son refused, scrambled down from his seat, tore open the door and ran outside. When Kieran had called him, Theo did not even look back.

He ought to go after him, he supposed. Kieran turned back to the kitchen and searched for his shoes; then a feeling of unfocused grief came over him. Sitting down, he stared at the floor.

Yesterday he had stopped in town to buy Theo a present. It was something that had been mercilessly advertised on TV, something Kieran actually disapproved of, but Lin had told him Theo coveted it. As soon as he got home, he had given him the parcel. Theo had unwrapped it slowly and carefully, but when he saw what was in the box his attitude had changed, and a huge smile came over his face.

‘Like it?’ Kieran had asked.

‘Yea-y!’

Theo had started wrestling with the toy.

‘Here,’ Kieran said, taking it from him. ‘Give it to me and I’ll put it together. You’ll smash it like that.’

‘Launch it, launch it,’ Theo demanded.

Kieran did his best. It was a dragon that flew by itself when cranked up. He wound the clockwork, and quite suddenly it soared up in the air, landing heavily on the opposite side of the room. Fifteen pounds for that? he thought.

‘Again, again.’

They let it fly a dozen times, then he tried to get Theo to sit in his lap.

‘Listen,’ he said.

‘Whirrr …’ Theo was opening and closing the dragon’s wings.

‘Theo, listen to me.’ Kieran took the toy away from him and hid it behind the chair. ‘Theo, Mummy might not come home for a while. She’s sick in the hospital.’

Theo said nothing.

‘Theo,’ he continued. ‘What did Mummy say about going to live in Hampton?’

The boy didn’t respond.

‘Is she cross with me?’

Theo stuck out his lower lip.

‘Why is she cross?’

Theo shook his head.

Kieran sighed. ‘I have to do some work now,’ he said. ‘Maybe Ruth will come and see you this afternoon.’

The violence of the child’s reaction surprised him. His son had struggled down from his grasp and stood in front of him, legs planted full-square, all defiance.

‘She not!’

Kieran tried to take hold of his hand, but Theo’s face was red with suffused fury. Then the boy had reached out.

For a second, Kieran had thought he wanted to be picked up and held or carried. He had started to hold out his own arms, smiling. Theo’s fist had connected with Kieran’s chest, and he felt a small pricking sensation. Kieran glanced down in surprise, and saw that the spear belonging to the toy dragon—a tiny ineffectual plastic spear only an inch long—was stuck in the weave of his sweater. He had looked back up at his son and saw Theo with his fist in his mouth, chewing on his knuckles.

Kieran now sat staring into space, thinking about this boy he hardly knew. He could count his mornings spent with Theo this year on the fingers of one hand. He never took him to school these days. He never even got round to playing cricket with him any more, having once vowed that he would teach him properly as soon as the boy was old enough. The life that Lin and Theo shared was a private thing, and Kieran was excluded from it.

Mother and son seemed unnervingly alike. Coming back after a long absence last year—he had been to Syria for five weeks—Kieran had found, instead of the welcoming committee he hoped for, no answer to his greetings shouted from the hallway. Offended, he had eventually found them out in the garden, curled up on a bench, bare-footed, bare-legged, interestedly inspecting stones they had fished up from the gravelly shallows of the river. Kieran had paused in the shelter of the trees, watching them.

Lin was wearing a cloth dressing gown over her swimsuit, Theo nothing at all. They were prising sticky, colourless worms from the underside of each stone.

‘What do they feel like, Theo?’ he had heard Lin ask.

‘Yucky.’

She had laughed. ‘They are. They’re awful yucky.’

The colour of her hair with its reddish tones, the faded pinks of the cloth on her shoulders, the small dark brown head at her shoulder and the pink rim of Theo’s open mouth in its unconscious expression of complete fascination, all of this scene imprinted itself on Kieran’s memory. He had hardly wanted to step forward and ruin the picture. When he did so, making his voice purposefully light and without a trace of the exclusion he felt, he was dismayed to see how accurately he had forecast his effect on them both. They stiffened and straightened and leapt up, as if he had caught them in some crime.

‘What’s all this?’ he had asked.

‘Nothing,’ Theo immediately retorted.

Lin had ruffled their son’s hair, raising her eyebrows in mock exasperation. She stepped forward and kissed Kieran lightly on the cheek. But he still felt that he had spoiled the afternoon, the hour.

All the time, he wanted to say how much he loved Theo. That ought to be easy to say—Lin said it easily. ‘Oh, Theo, I love you,’ she would say to him at night as she put him to bed, snuggling her face into the child’s neck, while he squealed with delight and threw his arms around her. ‘I love you more—right out into the sky.’ ‘I love you more—more than all the stars there are.’

Theo would desperately try to out-do her. ‘I love you tons, sixteen elephants, big tall buildings, Ray Bolt’s coal lorry. I love you wide, this wide, wider than the football pitch, as wide as this. I love you lions and tigers.’

That time Lin had sat back on her heels, laughing. ‘I love you lions and tigers? Oh, Theo.’

It had only been last January, and she had come downstairs still laughing, folding Theo’s clothes over one arm. ‘Do you know what he just said?’ she asked Kieran, putting her head around the door of his study. ‘He said, “I love you lions and tigers.” He said …’

She had stopped then. Kieran was aware of her standing there, but he had a marker on the page and wanted to put a footnote on it while he remembered his point. He had already heard them, anyway, even from the bottom of the stairs.

‘Kee,’ she had said after a moment. ‘Kee …?’

He had looked up, finally. ‘Yes?’

‘Why don’t you go up and say goodnight to him?’

‘I will,’ he had told her. He couldn’t remember now if he had done.

On the kitchen wall, the phone began to ring.

He brought himself back from the past, and picked it up.

‘Hello?’

‘Mr Gallagher?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry to disturb you so early in the day. This is Mark Werth, Mrs Gallagher’s consultant.’

‘Good morning.’

‘Mr Gallagher … I have a slight problem here.’

‘Is Lin all right?’

‘Yes. There’s been no major setback. But I would like her to see a colleague of mine.’

‘Why’s that?’

There was a pause. ‘Can I ask, are you intending to come down here?’

‘Today?’

‘I wonder if a visit from your son might do her some good.’

From the open door, Kieran could see Theo hanging upside-down on the fence gate, kicking the slats of wood. ‘I think it would upset him,’ he said. He turned back towards the room, shifting the phone to his other hand. ‘Who is this other colleague?’

‘Alan Carlisle. He’s a psychiatrist.’

‘I see.’

‘Purely for an initial examination. To clear my own mind as much as anything.’

Kieran made a fist of his free hand, waiting while the bone bloomed white under the skin. His nails dug into his palm.

‘Mr Gallagher … are you there?’

‘You must do what you think fit,’ he said. ‘But I’m not taking Theo there if Lin needs a psychiatrist. He’s been upset enough.’

‘She would like to see Theo, I know.’

‘Maybe in a few days.’

There was a pause. ‘Could I just ask one other question? Is your wife psychic?’

Kieran laughed outright. ‘What? No, of course not.’

‘Has she ever said she sees images, people and so on?’

Kieran let out a sound of exasperation. ‘Do you want my advice, Mr Werth?’ he said.

‘I want anything that will help me.’

‘Lin was ill last year. She had a … a kind of breakdown, I suppose. Her doctor here said it was postnatal depression. I have to tell you I didn’t quite believe that so long after Theo was born—almost three years. I love my wife, Mr Werth,’ he continued, ‘but she is very young, very brilliant, and rather … highly strung.’

‘I see,’ said Werth. ‘Thank you for telling me.’ There was a pause. ‘But actually I don’t think this is a mental problem.’

‘But you want her to see a psychiatrist.’

‘Just as a long shot. I’m doing other tests myself today.’

‘I will try to come over. But I shan’t bring Theo.’

They said their goodbyes. Kieran hung up the receiver, put his hands to his face, and held them there for what seemed like minutes. Eventually he lowered himself onto a kitchen chair, rested his elbows on his knees, and sat with his fingers pressed hard to his closed eyes.

Life with Lin had always been a whirlwind.

This was just another trip: another trip for which he was woefully unprepared.

He had first made love to Lin in his office, on his desk. The manuscript had been forgotten. He, and it, were swept away. As the weeks passed, he had found it impossible to concentrate. He had fouled up his seminars and lectures; he was called in to see Arthur Caldwell. Word spread round the department, and Kieran had made no effort even to conceal it.

In college they had called her one thing only—never her name. They called her the ‘Gee-Gee’—the men with a lewd note in their voices, the women more subtly. It stood for the Ghastly Girl. It had been said first at some drinks party, and it had stuck. Lin had thenceforward been—she still was—that ghastly girl. Thin, young, clever. To all the middle-aged women and the old men … that ghastly girl. ‘Oh, poor Ruth,’ they all said. ‘Poor Ruth! What did she do to deserve the ghastly girl?’

They were establishment snobs, stuffed shirts, traditionalists. To lust after the students was one thing, accepted as a necessary frisson that came with the job. Remarks about women were passed all the time, chauvinistic naturally. But to step over the borderline and actually have an affair with one, that was not done. It was humiliating, unforgivable. Kieran fell at once below the salt, and stayed there.

But he hadn’t been able to rid his mind of her. Sometimes, driving in, he would prepare a speech. He would prepare to dismiss her. The four weeks he had originally employed her for had long passed. Now he went on paying her for doing nothing. Still agonizing over it, he would get into his room, and without a word she would calmly sit down on the couch where his students were due to sit in not more than five minutes—she would not even suggest he locked the door—and she would lift up her skirt and, naked underneath, open her legs. He would find himself instantly on the floor, on his knees.

There is nothing so stupid as a man besotted with a younger woman. No grotesque shape he won’t bend himself into. He had let the deadline for his book slip. The phone calls had bounced around the air like echoes from another planet. Only when he was two months overdue, did she one day—she, not him—sit down and redraft the whole book, sketching out those fantastic, mind-numbing chapters.

It was so easy for her. So easy. She was so incisive, so neat and quick …

The moment he told Ruth of Lin’s pregnancy, Ruth got ready to leave him. No scene, nothing ugly, nothing violent. She bought herself a flat in town, and then moved out. It took less than three weeks. Ruth’s frigid, self-contained reaction had stunned him. Also, more to the point, it had made him feel a complete shitheel. Ruth had barely even wept—just a few tears one evening when she was feeling particularly tired. But there was no going back. Absolutely not unless he could swear never—never—to see or speak to Lin again.

What else could he do? Could he have abandoned Lin? Could he survive without Ruth? He had needed them both, wanted them both.

His life had been smooth before Lin came along. He had been promoted to his present post at thirty and had an excellent reputation. He was married to an accomplished older woman and they had a beautiful period home, always immaculate. His life had been level and even till then. He had worked dutifully on his books. Ruth had entered into the medical partnership at Gideon Street. Children were not an issue, as Ruth had honestly admitted her infertility to him, and he could never anyway imagine himself as a father. They had been a favoured couple then, in a summer landscape of compatible ease.

And then came Lin.

Swift, sexy, loving Lin. She was so unpredictable.

He grew rapidly to respect Lin’s opinions on his work, though she attacked it surgically, cruelly, cutting it to pieces and sewing it back-to-front. His thoughts now fragmented, pursuing marginal theories for the first time in his life. She had encouraged him. She would help do research for him, and find the most oblique notions wildly engrossing. It was as if he was being pushed, physically, mentally and emotionally, down a plunging rollercoaster—he could almost hear his own shrieks. He never knew her as a person but as a kind of phantom, a wraith that had sprung from a sexual fantasy straight into his arms. She was lithe and careless where Ruth was calculating and controlled. She was young and she blasted him with life. She was raw where Ruth was refined. Lin was addictive.

And she was so funny. She was perfectly capable of renewing her little dance alongside the benches in public places—the image that had so painfully first nailed him. And she was fond of elaborate, dreadful shaggy-dog stories, and she loved to watch the worst of the soap operas, and she was a fund of seemingly useless facts … and she spent hours meticulously correcting his manuscripts at the cost of her own work …

And she adored him. She would tell him that over and over again. Ruth had never been so demonstrative, and it bathed his ego in warmth and light. Lin was alive.

Alive, alive. So alive.

Two days after Ruth left home, he took Lin to the Priory.

‘I don’t want to live here,’ she had told him.

He had been amazed. ‘This is a wonderful house.’

‘It’s not mine, though,’ she said. ‘It belongs to you and Ruth.’

He had sat her down: she on the bottom step of the stairs in the hall, he squatting in front of her. ‘I can’t afford to take another house anywhere,’ he had said. ‘This house is part of my divorce settlement. It all had to be worked out. After the divorce, I suppose I’ll have to sell, as I don’t make enough money to pay the mortgage on my own.’

‘I’ll move in with you once you find somewhere else.’

This remark, so casual, had cut him to the quick. He had actually felt something pierce him: a kind of fear. He was sure to lose her. ‘You can’t live in that room on campus,’ he said.

‘Of course I can. What would the department say if I lived here with you?’

‘The department? Nothing. What’s it to do with them?’ He was really not naïve. He simply sounded so then—for interminable months on end. ‘You must live here. You’re pregnant.’

She had laughed. ‘It’s not an illness.’ She glanced around her. ‘All her things are here.’

‘They aren’t. Her clothes, her books—everything’s gone.’

‘I don’t mean those things. I mean the bed, the plates you eat from, the cups, the furniture. You bought them together. They belong to her.’

‘I’ll get her to take away whatever furniture you don’t like.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Lin said.

She did sleep in the bed, though. She slept between the sheets that Ruth had bought and embroidered. She put her head on the pillowcases decorated with Ruth’s intertwined acidanthera, their white faces outlined in red, framing Lin’s own white face and scribble of uncombed hair.

It dragged on for several weeks.

Sometimes Lin would stay for days, especially if she was working on a paper. He would come home and find some room—the kitchen, the bedroom—littered with pages.

‘What’s all this?’ he would ask.

‘I’m thinking about something.’

Her stays became longer. He became inured to the mess she created, though he disliked it. He tried to tidy away after her. There was never a meal on the table even if she had been home all day.

‘Are we going to eat anything?’

She would look up, grinning. ‘I don’t know. Are we?’

His publishers came down from London to see him. His editor was bemused by the changes in style in his latest book. They sat in the garden and talked about his future presentation. Lin was not in the house. Kieran had never mentioned her contribution to the manuscript. They offered him—after lengthy discussions—a new contract. Just before publication, he had been approached by Harry Marks.

Harry, in contrast, realized about Lin the first time he came down to visit; he was not easily fooled. She was there and, for once, she had cooked dinner—a wonderful dinner—and looked ravishing, fertile and earthy, then in her fourth month. And somehow, by the end of the first evening, without either of them referring to it, Harry knew that Lin was as much the driving force of the latest books as Kieran. He recognized something … saw something between them. He knew its value.

And of course he was impressed by Lin’s sharp, strange, innovative mind. He thought her sexy, too. He told Kieran so, and congratulated him. Kieran explained to Harry about Ruth, but the other man had only shrugged. ‘Happens all the time,’ he had said.

When Lin came back into the room, carrying the tray of coffee, his appreciative eye ranged over her again.

As she spent more and more time at the house, Ruth was obliterated by inches under the chaos Lin brought with her.

One morning, about eight weeks after Ruth had left, Kieran walked into the bedroom from the shower and stopped to look at her. Lin was sitting upright in bed, wearing her same shirt from the day before, her arms crossed over her stomach. She wore an expression of fright.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

Lin said nothing. She was frozen.

He came to sit down on the bed. ‘What is it?’

She shook her head.

‘Forgotten something? Not feeling right?’

‘Not feeling right,’ she murmured.

He had felt the first pale touch of fear. ‘Where? The baby?’

She gave him a lingering, sorrowful look. ‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Can’t tell me? Why not? What is it?’

She had put her head down on her knees. ‘I just can’t tell you,’ she whispered.

He had lifted her head. ‘If there’s something worrying you, I want to know.’

She said nothing.

But she had wept for days, on and off. He would find her lying on the floor, or curled on a seat outside, or in the bath with the water cold around her, sobbing bitterly.

‘Don’t you want a child?’ he had finally asked, exasperated.

‘Yes, yes …’

‘Then what’s the matter?’

She still wouldn’t say.

She seemed to be labouring with an inner, secret grief. He tried once or twice to penetrate it again, but without success.

‘You’ll hate me,’ she told him.

‘Hate you? Never.’

‘You will,’ she had moaned. ‘You will.’

He sensed a new self-destructiveness in her that worried him. He wanted to be close to her, to forge a deeper relationship. He now missed Ruth and their comfortable conversations, and had thought that at this time, while Lin necessarily slowed down, he might be able to enjoy something similar with her. But Lin eluded him, even when in his arms. She was far away now, in communion with someone else—the other person inside her.

It came to a head one evening when she was five months pregnant. It was February and the temperature had plummeted. Because the Priory was so cold, she had refused to stay there. He went to see her in the rented room he so hated, and was furious to find that it, too, was icy. She was sitting at her desk, wrapped in several layers of clothes, reading and making notes. The door was unlocked.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘What does it look like? This has to be in tomorrow.’

‘I want you to stop.’

She gazed at him, put down her pen and laughed. ‘You what?’

‘Stop.’

‘Stop this essay?’

‘Stop, and come and live with me.’

She rested her head on one hand, perfectly at ease. ‘Come live with me and be my love,’ she had murmured. ‘And we shall all the pleasures prove.’

He put a hand under her arm and pulled. ‘Now,’ he insisted.

Dragged to her feet, she pulled away from him. ‘What’s the matter?’

He had looked around, almost speechless with impotent fury. Lin had promptly sat down again.

‘I paid off Ruth’s portion of the mortgage,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ she replied tonelessly, staring at him, her legs crossed, one foot tapping mid-air.

‘I took out a bank loan,’ he said.

‘Is that good?’

‘Lin,’ he said, ‘I want us to get married.’

Their wedding—almost eight months to the day after he had told Ruth of the affair; she had, with her customary efficiency, filed for divorce on the grounds of his adultery—was very quiet.

It was a bright June day. They went to that same Italian restaurant, and he ordered champagne. When they got home, Lin, standing on the steps of the Priory, had flung her arms around his neck and kissed him. He held her at arm’s length and stared at her.

‘Will I ever know what to make of you?’ he had asked.

‘No,’ she said.

As they came into the Priory’s hall, he had picked up the morning mail from the floor.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ she said.

‘I’ll bring you some tea,’ he told her, sifting through the letters while watching her slow ascent out of the corner of his eye.

‘Lovely.’ She was almost at the top of the stairs.

‘There’s a letter for you.’

She paused and looked back at him as he turned it over in his hands. It had been forwarded from the lodging house she had left the week before.

‘Who’s it from?’ she said.

‘How do I know?’

‘Maybe that man who’s always chasing me,’ she said. ‘The one called Bill.’ She continued on up, laughing at her own joke, and singing, ‘Bill oh Bill oh Bill …’

As Kieran waited in the kitchen for the kettle to boil, it suddenly occurred to him that it could be her rent demand. It would soon be the beginning of the summer vac, and she would not have written to tell them she was vacating her room. He opened the envelope to check.

But it wasn’t from the lodging house. It was from an address in Liverpool: a single sheet of handwritten paper, dated five days earlier.

Dear Lindsay,

Not that you will be interested—but. Mum had a stroke two days ago. She is in Assen Street hospital, ward 4.

Things don’t look very good.

Robert

Kieran had folded it slowly and put it on the tray. He poured the tea and stood for some seconds looking blankly at the cups. Then he went upstairs.

Lin was lying on the bed, still wearing all her clothes. He put down the tray, picked up the letter and gave it to her. As she unfolded it, he asked, ‘Who is Robert?’

She read it, still lying on her back.

‘Who’s Robert?’ he repeated.

She sat up slowly.

‘My brother.’

Kieran sat down on the end of the bed and stared at her. It struck him all at once—and with the force of a thunderbolt—that he really knew nothing at all about this shining girl that he had so quickly and wilfully married. She had put the letter down and was drinking her tea. He was amazed at her apparent calm.

‘We must go and see your mother,’ he said.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I haven’t seen any of them for five years.’

‘That doesn’t matter now. They’ve written to you. This is important.’

‘I don’t have to see her,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t know me anyway, if it’s that bad. What good would it do?’

The coldness of her reply astounded him.

‘She’s your mother!’

She got up from the bed and walked to the window. ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ she said.

‘No, I don’t. Not surprising, really.’

She crossed her arms, staring out at the view. ‘Not everyone lives like you,’ she said.

‘What does that mean?’

She mimed two blinkers on either side of her head. ‘Like this—in your fairy grotto.’

He was staring at her in shock. ‘What are you talking about?’

She shook her head. ‘Taking people at face value. You don’t see things, you don’t look under the surface, you’re not curious, you …’ She turned to face him. ‘You slip over the top, do you know? Slip over the top, scootering along like a cat on a wet roof. You accept things, you regurgitate them, you don’t question them … you trust people.’

She delivered the final line as if condemning him. He couldn’t believe that the conversation had become a catalogue of his own faults. He stood up.

‘You must go and see your mother,’ he insisted. ‘Pack a bag. I’ll drive you to Liverpool.’

‘No.’

He turned on his heel, went to the wardrobe and took a case down from the top shelf. She came up behind him, wrenched it from his hands and threw it down on the floor.

‘Can’t you hear me?’ she demanded. ‘I said no!’

‘Pack the case, Lin. You haven’t got much time.’

‘I don’t care if there’s no time at all.’

He picked the case up. ‘I’ll pack it for you.’

And he did so. She retreated to the bed.

‘Kieran,’ she said, after a minute or more, ‘I can’t.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I can’t. You don’t know.’

‘Pack your case,’ he said, turning for the door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to ring the hospital,’ he said, without looking back, ‘to see if your mother is still alive.’