The last time I saw Annie was just over a week ago, before I left London. We agreed to meet in the heath. I wore my best pair of shoes. I don’t know what possessed me to wear the shoes. Rain was inevitable. It was our first meeting since she’d gone; it felt like a special occasion I suppose.
On the pavement, my feet pinched reassuringly. I have reason to remember the details of that day. The streets were full of hammering men. Everywhere you look these days things are being built. According to the London news, we are enjoying a real estate boom of unprecedented proportion. On Radio 4, there has been angry talk that England is going the way of America with apartment buildings and convenience stores, office softball in the park.
I waited for Annie sitting on our bench. The inscription in the backrest reads, For Letitia Becksworth Who Fed the Birds Here 1918–1984. For no particular reason, it is the bench where we’ve always met. We met there before we were married and during our little marriage as well. I looked across the flat stretch of earth towards the trees in the direction I knew she would come and imagined what I would look like, sitting in the same spot, on the same bench where she had seen me so many times before. I wanted to look impressive, dignified, if alone. I leaned back, spread both arms across the back of the bench, and crossed one leg over the other, pointing my shoe in the direction of the ponds. Time passed. We were to meet at two o’clock and two o’clock came and went. I think for a moment, I thought she was not coming.
When I was twelve years old Maureen and I drove seven hours from New York to Montreal of all places, a vast grayness, to catch a cheap flight to Europe. I imagine that with the cost of rental car and petrol, the cost was probably the same as flying from New York. Anyway, we never flew from Montreal again. It was early spring. The city had just emerged from a great freeze and there was a scorched light in the air. To make things worse, it was raining. Maureen’s red hair hung in delicate curls beneath her knitted orange hat. We were late and in a rush, but arrived with enough time to spend a few minutes in the magazine store. We momentarily separated. I left her with the trolley and our luggage and went to look for something to read. A few minutes passed before I heard her let out a scream. “Someone’s taken my bag!” I came around the stack of magazines and found her pulling luggage off the trolley and telling the embarrassed shop attendant, that of course she was sure, and that she had turned her back for only an instant. When she saw me, she said it again: “My bag, Gordon!” A crowd was gathering. “Well, go out and have a look!” she said. I left the store to see if I could see anyone suspicious, only to find myself followed by another shop attendant who thought I was trying to steal the magazine I still held in my hand. Our passports and tickets were in her purse as was her wallet and all our money. Finally, an airport official arrived: a man in a good suit and a red tie. Maureen all but fell into his arms. She had begun to cry. He pushed our trolley for us as we walked the length of the terminal. As we went, people stopped and looked at us, wondering what was wrong. He only stopped reassuring Maureen to snap seriously into his walkie-talkie in French. We sat in a security office for almost an hour as Maureen sniffled and filled out a form and then were escorted to the Air Canada first class lounge. Our flight left without us. Someone made Maureen a cup of tea and gave me a Fanta. We were joined by a series of airport officials who tried to come up with a solution; did we have friends we could stay with? Could they fly us back to New York? Maureen looked at them seriously and told them that we had no one, that all we had was each other and that what was in that bag represented a most of our worldly possessions. Just when she had silenced the last and most senior of the officials, she finished her cup of tea. She held out her empty cup and, instinctually, the official took it from her. “Could I have a little more, please?” she asked. As I watched her grow increasingly comfortable in the luxurious surroundings and slowly extract for us two free nights in an airport hotel (time enough to have new passports issued) and tickets for a later flight to London, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that I understood why Theo had left her. The realization seemed so terrible I could not look at her as she sat beside me. I remember staring into the magazine I had been allowed to keep free of charge. I was afraid she would be able to guess what I was thinking from my expression. I had understood what made her unlovable—why Theo had cast us off—but, years later, as I sat across from Theo at some dinner somewhere, I suddenly realized that it was she who left him.
I have been told the fact that I have no real brothers and sisters is part of my misfortune. Siblings are the means by which children reassure themselves that it is their parents and not they who are partially insane. Annie and I have no children. Until quite recently—sitting on that bench, for instance, when I imagined what she would look like coming across the heath, her skirt moving in time with the branches, a breeze offering an unexpected glimpse of her legs—I still felt hopeful about those things. If we did have children, would they be able to decide clearly who left whom? I feel Annie left me, and it was she who packed and sat down on the edge of our bed where I was still partially asleep. “Gordon,” she began. “I have something to tell you . . . .” The rest dwindled off into silence; I cannot remember what she said, only that she got up and moved around the room and then came back to sit down again and was talking all the time. She said it was me who had left her. I stopped working; I stopped doing anything at all, she said. When we were in the room together, I was nowhere nearby. But if we had children, a son perhaps, and he boarded a plane with Annie, would he be able to guess?
Clara, our dog, a blur of chocolate-colored hair, came first, bounding from beneath the branches. She stopped, her head erect, and although I was much too far away, I thought perhaps she had a happy sense that I was near. Instead of bounding towards me, however, she pushed her face into the silver grass. Field mice torment her. She can hear them calling from under the ground. She digs for them, occasionally gets one, accidentally kills it and then seems to feel terrible. She spends several minutes throwing it up in the air, trying to wake it up again, before giving up and mournfully carrying it around in her soft mouth.
After a moment, Annie appeared behind her. She looked up and waved and then trudged slowly towards me. It took Annie a long time to cross the grass and I had a long time to watch her come. She wore one of her father’s coats, rolled at the sleeves, reddish brown, and surrounding her like a cape. She held her arms folded across her chest and did not reach up to comb away her hair when the wind blew it into her eyes. Clara kept her nose pressed firmly into the dirt until Annie turned and said some encouraging word. It was inaudible to me across the windy heath.
Annie is very short so when she arrived she seemed still to be coming, a little ways off on the horizon. She smiled brightly. “Hello, Gordon.” There was an awkward pause in which, if we were that sort of couple, we might have embraced. But we were not that sort of couple. For a terrible moment, I thought we might shake hands, but instead she touched my arm, went up on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek. The first impression one gets when meeting Annie is of her size (she is five foot two) and of how well she compensates for this fact by being so well proportioned. Or perhaps it is only me who noticed her size and her proportion, as I am almost six-foot three, and together we must have looked at times, dancing for instance, an odd pair. Her skin is pale white, her eyes small and blue. Her dark hair is thick and curly. She photographs well, as I once told her, and which she said was a backhanded insult, although I did not intend it to be.
With the initial greeting out of the way we seemed more like strangers than before. From across the park we may have looked to be engaged in the first stuttering steps of a love affair. She sat down beside me. Her fingers trembled as she lit a cigarette. The smoke poured out of her, disappearing immediately into the breeze as if it had nothing to do with her. “Quite cold, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. I reached over and took one of her hands and warmed it between my mine.
“It’s good to see you,” she said. She removed her hand and patted me reassuringly on my knee. She turned on the bench so that she was facing me. She softened her gaze slightly, doing her trick of emphasizing the space between us such that I am suddenly aware of the warmth of her breath and the strands of hair leaning out towards me on the breeze. It is very persuasive.
We sat together in silence for a moment and then she stood up. “Should we walk?” she asked. I said we should. She wore jeans and a pair of practical Wellington boots. She pointed down at my shoes. “Are you all right in those?” she asked. “Maybe we should stay on the path.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“You’ll ruin them,” she protested.
“No, I’m fine,” I said. “Really.”
“Well, if you don’t mind.”
We walked in a long loop, through thick wooded places at times. Annie put Clara on the lead when we were near the pond. We paused and looked over the redbrick bridge into the shallow water. We passed the parking lot where there is a fairground in the summertime in which a very somber man was burning wood, his face blackened. An enormous flame leapt in and out of a barrel in front of him. He kept his eyes perfectly focused on the flame and at moments, it seemed to be jumping up and playfully tapping him on the nose. He had an incredible amount of wood to burn; he seemed to be burning an entire building. We walked up towards the swimming ponds, past Kenwood House. In a crevice between two banks a great tree had fallen. Clara wandered in and out of its branches and lay down in the puddle where it had pulled up its roots. Half of the twisted branches were broken. If the tree were righted they would have fallen to the ground as sticks.
We walked all the way to the other side of the heath, where the buildings sadly reappeared. The heath is, unfortunately, smaller than I once thought. We didn’t talk very much. We don’t have children to talk about. We don’t, currently, have a marriage, and all the day to day things married people talk about. We talked about Clara, our dear, but fairly stupid chocolate Labrador. We talked about Annie’s family. We did not talk about my work as my failure to do any of it lately infuriates her. We did not talk about her work for she has never believed her sort of work was worth talking about. So for long periods of time, we said nothing at all.
From the foot of the hill, the people at the top seemed to be barely attached to the earth. We walked up the steepest side, looking up at them, dark figures with dogs, kites and pushchairs.
“It was lovely to see you,” she said when we had reached the top.
“You’re not going?” I asked.
She shook her watch down on her hand and checked the time. “I think I should.”
“Let’s sit down for a moment.” I suggested. “Please.” I sat down and patted the cold wood beside me.
“You said on the phone there was something you wanted to talk to me about.” She stood there a moment I think hoping I would get up again and then she sat down as if she were exhausted. “I thought maybe it was about Christmas. I’ve decided I’m going to spend it with my Dad. He’s going to Portugal.” I looked up at her; I must have looked unhappy because she went on. “Look, we’ve never particularly liked Christmas, Gordon. I always want to go away, and you don’t want to do anything.” She waited for me to say something and then shook her head. Her pale cheeks were red from our walk. She rubbed my arm vigorously as if she had just given me an injection and stood up. She took the lead out of her pocket and called out for Clara.
“Maureen died on Sunday,” I said; I don’t know why I said it. “In America.”
Her back was partially turned, her words swept away in the wind. “Well, that’s where she lived,” I think she said. I know she felt I had trapped her. When she turned back she said, “Gordon, I’m so sorry. You must be so upset.”
“I’m not.”
“Of course you are, Gordy.” She sighed heavily. “What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I’m supposed to make the trip.”
She sat down and rubbed my arm again, this time more gently. “I can stay a bit longer,” she said. “But let’s keep walking, otherwise I’m going to freeze.”