order to be here, in order for them to be real. Why am I here? I felt fear prickle my skin. I turned and walked quickly back the way I had come.
The only lights now from the cluster of houses were the cracks from behind curtains and I felt an overpowering sense of loneliness engulf me. I looked at the cottage and the closed front door, and wanted to run up the path and hammer on it for Adam and Ruth to let me in.
I got back into the Volkswagen. I was too tired to drive away. I would risk parking here for tonight. My hands trembled as I lit the gas burner to make tea. I climbed into my sleeping bag, pulled back the window curtain and watched the stars.
I could hear the waters of the creek moving gently around me and splashing against the sides of small boats. Curlews wailed their lament, then were silenced by the night. I sat up and stared across at the thatched cottage where Adam and Ruth moved about together inside.
One by one the downstairs lights went off and two lights came on upstairs. I thought I could dimly hear the sound of a clarinet. I imagined Adam sitting up in bed in his pyjamas, playing. Then every light went off in all the cottages. There was only a heavy blackness, as if every light in the world had been extinguished.
I felt as if a thick blanket were enveloping and pressing down on me. I opened my mouth to cry out but no sound would come. I stretched out my hand into the cold dark air to feel the warmth of their hands. Rosie’s little hot, sticky one and the large, safe hand of my love. My fingers grasped only air. There was nothing there, nothing to hold on to and my open mouth could not even form a scream.
I woke with the dawn and sat crouched and cold in my sleeping bag to watch the sun flare up over the dark forest on the far side of the creek, then rise to touch the water. My spirits rose and swooped and soared in a moment of wonder at the sheer mystical beauty of yellow winter sun rising through mist that lay over the water like a ghostly blanket.
As the sun came up I saw a light go on in an upstairs room of the cottage and I got out of my sleeping bag and pulled on jeans and a sweater. I tied on my walking boots and reached for my Barbour. Then I sat and waited.
The light in the bedroom went off and one came on in a downstairs room. After a minute the front door opened and Adam emerged. He was muffled in green waterproofs, hat and scarf. Outside his coat he carried binoculars against his chest.
He walked quickly down the garden path and turned left up the creek path. He was making for the lake. I waited for a few moments, then pulled up my hood and slowly followed him.
I smiled as I thought of Ruth asleep in her bed while I was with Adam on the outside of that womblike cottage. I was watching over Adam as a new day began.
The birds were singing as if their hearts would burst and the waders screeched out across the water. Ahead, I could just hear the boy’s footsteps. I could not see him because of the mist that lay over everything. He stopped every now and then, and I stopped too. I knew he must be looking through his binoculars but there would be little to see on a morning like this.
When he came to the lake the skies began to lift and lighten a little and I could see his outline clearly. He paused, left the path and moved over boggy ground to the left of the lake where there were large stones he could sit on to watch the waders. Then his outline disappeared. I stopped and leant on a gate leading into a field running parallel to the lake. I strained to hear his movements but there was only silence.
I gathered my coat round me and, holding the hood to my face, moved carefully on down the path between lake and creek, past the point where I thought Adam must have left the path to the far side of the lake. I tucked myself into the undergrowth. The ground was soggy and the stone I sat on was damp.
I waited, waited amid the rustling and swooping and singing of birds. As the sun filtered through, the mist began to evaporate and rise up over the water a few metres like a theatre curtain. The dim shape of Adam started to materialise on the other side of the lake in early morning light. He was crouched on a rock, watching something through his binoculars.
I was at an angle from him so he could not see me as I sat hard against the hedge, but for a minute it seemed as if he stared straight across at me. Then he raised his glasses again and trained them skywards at an egret flying over my head towards him.
He birdwatched for perhaps twenty minutes, then he got up from his boulder, stretched, shook his legs and moved back to the creek path.
I got up too and kept my distance. The sun was beginning to burn off the sea mist. Adam walked slowly but seemed ill at ease. He looked left and right; then he stopped, turned and looked behind him. I stood very still, close to the hedgerow, and hardly breathed. He could not see me, but he must feel me here.
He shivered suddenly, then turned and walked quickly on back to the cottage. He almost ran up the path and the front door slammed behind him.
Most of the houses were still in darkness. I got back into the Volkswagen. I needed to drive away before anyone was up. The car engine was noisy and as I turned in the halflight I saw the boy standing in his unlit bedroom watching me.
The car lights flickered across the wall of the cottage before I turned and drove away up the hill. Next time I would park at the other end of the creek where the woods made it easier not to be noticed.
Ruth had been determined not to put a telephone in the cottage. She liked the illusion that she wasn’t easy to get hold of in Cornwall. She kept in contact with work by e-mail. Peter complained bitterly because the cottage was in a dip and reception for mobile phones was terrible. Ruth suspected, deep down, that it was really Peter she was avoiding.
Sometimes she dreaded hearing his good-natured, solicitous voice because she imagined it held a veiled disappointment in her. She knew she was being unfair and it was her stubborn unwillingness even to talk about having his child that was unreasonable.
It was becoming a hurdle between them and Ruth did not want to discuss it because she would have to face the moral implications of marrying a man without making it clear she did not want his children. The honourable thing would be separation or divorce. Peter could then marry a good Jewish girl who would bear him the children he and his family in Israel desperately craved.
Peter loved her and Adam so generously. He had married a Gentile against fierce parental wishes and how had she repaid him? With as little of herself as possible. Ruth thought that for Peter any happiness from this marriage was due to Adam, not her.
She went outside and walked a little way up the hill to ring him. Peter sounded so glad to hear her it gave her a guilty ache between her ribs, where my heart should lie. She described the alterations to the cottage they had arranged earlier in the year. She told him what she and Adam had been doing. She told him how beautiful the creek was at dusk as she stood talking to him, despite the gloomy weather.
‘I miss you, Ruth. I wish I were there with you both. I’m weary of this wretched merger and commuting back and forth.’
‘You must be. It seems to have gone on and on. You’ve got to take a break soon, Peter, or you’ll crack. Surely your family realise you are exhausted with the constant travelling?’
He snorted wryly. ‘My mother worries about me, as only mothers do. My father and brothers are impervious to anything but getting the right terms drawn up. They certainly don’t understand the word compromise in business. Anyway, I’m OK. How’s Adam?’
‘He’s jogging up the hill to talk to you now. Take care of yourself, Peter.’
‘You too.’ She heard him hesitate, longing for her to say more, or anything that would enable him to say I love you, Ruth.
Adam took the