was I. This had come out of the blue, we were whoozy in slapdash evening sunshine. He was lying in bed, our bed, and I was sitting on the edge. There should be a word for the edge of a bed, that crucial, pivotal place. I was leaving him, but not quite back in the world. The warmth of him was on my skin: a sensation of blood-warm water. He was propped on one elbow, he had been drawn up in my wake, but I had a sense that this was as far as he was coming: he would stay there for a while, happy with my body-heat wrapped into the bedclothes. His smile was dazed because he had been dozing; he was smiling because he had been trying to persuade me to turn back, but knew that he could only do so a few times and that this was the time he had lost. His little dare was a diversional tactic: I had to stay a moment longer in order to answer.
I answered, and he had what he wanted. I married him because he was good and good-natured and he had faith in me and he loved me, and I loved him for that. Looking at him looking as if he had never before set foot in the world, I was thinking, You’re perfect. Marrying him must have been the right thing to do. The problem is that somehow it was wrong for me: the closest I can come to what is wrong is that I married Philip because of him, not because of me.
Edwin and I were in the coffee shop for two hours and we never did have any cake; cake did not happen. Perhaps we never paused for long enough to make a decision of the magnitude required by the cake display. I was stoked with coffee, that raw, black bean juice, and he sipped his way through several pots of camomile tea. Finally, the conversation moved from the state of our respective private lives to the only person our lives have in common: George. Edwin explained that he had finished interviewing George; he will not be returning to my town. When we said goodbye, he wanted to know if I would be in London next week.
I said, ‘Possibly.’
I have no plans; but conversely, there is nothing to stop me.
And now, nearly a whole twenty-four hours later, Hal and I are patrolling our territory. Ahead, a poster announces a fun run, surely a contradiction in terms. Beneath, a small, bedraggled, handwritten poster pleads for the safe return of a missing cat. The pitiful inventory of charms concludes with, She might be hiding.
Cloud, today, is thin and broken like the milky residue of bubble bath on cool bathwater.
Earlier, Hal was sunbathing on the carpet in front of the window. On cloudy mornings, he will follow me around the house, staring into my eyes; sometimes whimpering and going to the door. He is stilled by sunshine: this morning, all that I heard from him was the occasional sigh.
Once I said to Philip, ‘Hal’s sighs are so human.’
He looked sceptical.
I had to explain: ‘Well, I mean, do cats sigh?’
Across the park is the blind dog, a very old red setter, florid, with eye-catchingly fluorescent cataracts. The dog’s habit is to lumber from the path – her ribboned coat an autumnal grass skirt – and stagger in circles as if preparing a bed. Then she sits, cautiously, and sniffs, extravagantly: dredging the air for scents.
‘She’s happy,’ her owner reassured me, when we first met them. The owner – unlike her dog – is a youthful middle age. ‘That’s all she wants to do.’
What else can she do?
Usually, Hal tries to be sociable and the setter tries to reciprocate, bumping into him time and time again like something on water. The first time, we two owners laughed kindly over this sorry display of compromised dogginess, this cobbled-together bottom-sniffing.
While apologising for Hal’s enthusiasm I had turned towards him.
Behind me, the woman said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t hear very well; I lip-read.’
Immediately I realised that I had indeed been listening to the indistinct speech of someone who is deaf.
She sees me, now, and waves.
What a coincidence, seeing her here. Working in my garden, today, for the third consecutive day, is Carl, Jason’s cousin; a cousin in need of work – odd jobs – for the summer months before beginning a college course.
‘What’s the course?’ I asked Carl, on his first day.
‘Signing.’
‘Painting them?’
He laughed. ‘You’re thinking of sign writing. I’ll be doing sign language.’
On Carl’s first day, Philip called to me from the kitchen when he arrived home: ‘Poppy? Why is there an Adonis in our garden?’
I called back from the hallway, ‘Better than a gnome.’
Joining him at the window, I said, ‘He isn’t an Adonis; look how skinny he is.’
Philip smirked, and went from the room singing, She was thirty-one, I was seventeen.
Carl’s job is to clear the back of the garden, the patch which Philip has always avoided. Philip stays close to the house, pruning and planting. Behind, beyond the pond, is an area decades-deep in brambles and rubble. In many ways, we took on too much when we took on this house: a house that was big enough for three, but dilapidated enough to be affordable. A knock-down price, says Philip: they paid us to knock it down.
When Jacqueline was here, we had no energy for DIY; but since she has gone, we seem to have even less.
The clearance is heavy work for Carl; heavy work in heavy weather. The unrelenting sun is a problem for him. His back is the colour of cinnamon. All day, he is dressing and undressing, putting on and then pulling off his T-shirt, each rise and fall of the neckline tousling his hair.
From Jason, I know two facts about Carl: at the end of last year, he separated amicably from his girlfriend of five years; and he is twenty-seven. He has the kind of face and figure that will never slacken. God’s own bone structure.
I was never beautiful, but seemed to have whatever was needed: I had whomever I wanted. Perhaps there were beautiful bits of me; perhaps I was beautiful in bits, and had enough to do the trick. Whatever I did have will now have faded. Not literally, unfortunately: my hair is as weal-coloured as ever, and my skin still glows like freshly-sliced pear flesh. But I cannot be a patch on what I was. I cannot shake the feeling that I am nothing, nowadays; I am scuttled bones.
Whenever Carl catches me watching him from the window, he smiles. That smile is far from self-conscious, or reluctant. It is sheer smile. I remember an expression that was favoured by my mother: There is no side to him. Whenever I look away, he comes with me, his image burned on to my eyes. Asleep, I dream of him. The dreams come in the mornings, when sunshine strokes my eyelids. They are close to daydreams. Too close. They are sexual dreams, dreams of sex, vocal sex; more sexual, somehow, than any sex that I have ever had. In these dreams I am not me; I am no one else, but not me. I am no one. I am desire: something fed into a vein, distilled, heavy but slick, treacly, deadly, pure.
When the dream drains away, I am beached in my bed. And for a time, the real, everyday world is beyond me. Coming to, dry-mouthed but damp everywhere else, sloppy with sexual desire, I am rudderless, a mess of limbs and linen. Then I begin to be aware of Philip. He is turned demurely away into his doze. He seems so far away, borne on his tidy half of the bedclothes, waiting patiently for the turn of consciousness. For him, sleeping, dreaming and waking are not the exertions that they have been for me. Across the expanse, he is unrecognisably-shaped and I take a moment to make sense of him. If I reach to touch him, he is dough-warm and calico-clean.
It’s nothing, it’s physical: this is what I tell myself, whenever I look at Carl.
I feel like Samantha in Bewitched, acting the model housewife and coping with a contrary nature.
Carl is scrupulously cheerful, as if to be otherwise would be to do me a disservice. He called me Mrs Summerfield until I impressed upon him not to do so. Early this morning we had coffee together. Having brought my coffee into the garden, I called: ‘Come over here, have a break.’ He