37

Rita

Walnut?” Robbie cracks his fist, shakes away the shell, and presses the brain-like nut into Rita’s hand. His gaze locked to hers, he closes her fingers slowly, one by one, each tugging some internal string inside Rita’s body until she feels tuned to him, like an instrument. “More where that came from.” He nods at the majestic tree hanging over his garden. The firelight streams in his eyes. “You won’t starve with me, Miss Rita.”

Rita bites into the walnut, her eyes half closed. Has she ever tasted anything more delicious? Nothing like the stale, bitter nuts she and Nan ate every Christmas, nervously, due to the fragility of Nan’s dentures. This is a different experience altogether. Eating a walnut in the woods! With a fat gold harvest moon hanging above the trees and a dog at her feet! She’s fallen into a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel, like the ones she read in the local library as a child.

Robbie’s small stone cottage, embraced on all sides by woodland, a fair walk from the road, once belonged to his late parents, “and before that, my grandparents,” he told her with simple pride. Inside it’s scruffy but ordered, glossy with age and patina. She could have spent hours poking curiously around in his workshop, a barnlike building that extends into the garden, a treasure trove of planes, lathes, band saws, and grinders, meaty lumps of ash and elm waiting to be turned into something else, given new life. But it’s one of those perfect summer nights, and the only place to be is in the garden, where they sit on a log next to a spitting fire under an indigo sky, pinholed with stars. The air is so still that the candles, stuck in empty wine bottles, don’t blow out. Rita’s full of the ham, smoky from being cooked over the fire, tender enough to feather on her fork. And she sloshes with beer when she laughs. Which is often.

“Are you warm enough?” Robbie breaks the forest hush, which feels simultaneously intensely private, a silence that only they can inhabit, and excited and alive, like it’s crackling. “Here. A blanket.”

“Thanks.” Her body absorbs the brush of his fingertips against the back of her neck, the lanolin smell of the wool. She finishes her beer—she’s so pleased he has nothing but beer, not something sweet and fizzy in a silly bottle, as if he knew what she liked—and sneaks a glance at Robbie’s mouth, the cactus stubble on his upper lip. She wishes she could capture just this, exactly as it is, and trap it under glass.

“Let me.” Robbie opens a new bottle of beer, chilled from the plastic bucket of ice, and passes it to her, leaning so that she can feel the muscular ridge of his body. His leg meets hers and stays there. Distance closed. She smiles. The dog looks up at them, glancing from one to the other, like a weary chaperone.

“I mustn’t return to duty drunk.”

“Don’t see why not. We’ll walk back. That’ll sober you up.”

“Good idea,” she says weakly, not wanting to sober up. Wanting, in fact, to get gloriously plastered and never leave.

The surrounding forest feels like it’s been grown just for them, the trees sculpted like bonsai, teased into shape to let in just the perfect amount of light—dreamy, underwatery—and the densest shadows against which the flames can flicker and lick.

She strokes the dog’s hard silky head because her hand suddenly needs to touch something. When she looks up at Robbie, his eyes are fixed on her. She smiles. She peels off her pink cardigan, midday hot all of a sudden, and wonders if there’s been some hiccup in the universe. How come she hasn’t realized Robbie was this attractive before tonight? When she had a chance. When he actually wanted to kiss her. Now she’s a mess of feelings that have nowhere to go. A weight is pressing down on her pelvis.

“So, Rita?” he teases.

“So?” She leans closer, stretching out one leg from under the folds of her skirt, not minding its length for once. Is she flirting? Is this what flirting feels like? She likes it.

The evening has been studded with these taut moments, before loosening again and turning into something else. Sparks from the fire flutter up in the wind and blow about. The dog closes his watchful eye and falls asleep.

“We never did dance that time.” He has a smile in his voice. The hint of something else too, and it lodges inside her body, sweetly.

“I’m too tall to dance,” she says, even though she couldn’t care less how tall she is tonight, and neither, it seems, can he. He pulls her up by the hand, easily, as if she were a wisp of a thing.

“You are magnificent, Rita.”

She throws back her head and laughs, so her cowlick bounces free of the hair grip.

When he kicks off his shoes Rita hesitates, then decides she doesn’t hate her feet anymore and follows his example. The ground is soft underfoot. She wants to lift his shirt and sniff his skin. The trees move and sway around them as they dance. The dog slopes away when they roll to the ground, the grass and bracken in their hair, their clothes peeling off, all breath and bodies, until she’s there, stark naked in front of a man for the first time in her life, stripped of everything she’s spent her entire life trying to hide, exposed, horrified, flying with joy.

But then he sees them. His expression instantly sobers. He traces the zipper-like scar across her stomach with a fingertip. She can’t speak. She’ll die of embarrassment and desire. The scars are a turnoff. Fred couldn’t even look at them.

“What happened to you?” he asks.

Because there’s nowhere to hide now, she tells him. Not just the actual accident: the flash of red deer leaping out; the car swerving and hitting the tree; her own escape, the first to be pulled out of the fireball—and the last. But what happened afterward. How she was in hospital for six months and spent most of the time looking at the strip-lit ceiling, metal-pinned legs cantilevered up, reversing events, making time go backward, the smashed car and the broken bodies fling back together. The flames extinguish. Returning the three of them to the safety of the campfire, the hands on her father’s wristwatch stuck forever at five past one.

“I’m so sorry, Rita.” Robbie presses his forehead against hers, as if to pour the pain from her head into his.

“There’s something else. Something very few people know. My . . . my secret.” Since she’s nothing to lose anymore, she tells him about the day a doctor stood next to her bed and said to her nan, “It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” and Nan had sucked hard on her teeth, then said, “At least her face is fine.”

Nan only explained once she came out of hospital. She lowered her voice in case the neighbors could hear and said, “Never tell a man straightaway, or you’ll never pass go. Wait until the time is right, when they love you for you, Rita, and then you might stand a chance.”

She explains how the time was never “right” enough to tell Fred. After he proposed, she didn’t want to ruin things, not when they saw each other so infrequently anyway, her being in London with the Harringtons, him in Torquay. But he kept going on and on about children, how he needed a son to take on the family business, and how their son would be big and strong, just like Rita, with his father’s eye for the meatiest cut of shin and brisket, the juiciest slice of tongue.

What could she do? Once married, she could hardly pretend, month after month, they’d just been unlucky. And didn’t he say he loved her to bits? So she called him from the phone box on the corner of the Harringtons’ crescent: “I got damaged, Fred. Down there. I won’t have kids.” The shocked pause went on forever.

“But I’d never have asked you to marry me if you’d told me,” he’d said eventually. And she’d realized she’d known that all along.

There. It’s out. Rita stares up at the sky. The moonlight falls on her bare skin like rain.

“Lucky,” he says.

“Lucky?” she repeats, with a hollow laugh. Her heart is one big bruise.

“You found out Fred’s true character before you walked down the aisle.” Robbie rolls on top of her, pinning her down, weighting his body’s length against hers. She doesn’t register she’s crying until he wipes her tears away with his thumb. “And I’m a lucky bugger too. Because you’re not married to that idiot and this means I can kiss you from your head to your toes.”

And every crevice besides. God. She had no idea such sensations existed. Lying back on the ground afterward, her body quivering, trying to catch her racing breath, she feels . . . reborn. Robbie reaches for her hand and brings it to his mouth, skimming her knuckles with his lips, and she smiles, so lost in him, the warm summer’s night, she doesn’t hear the distant gunshots, muted by the trees.