Limestone and Clay (24 page)

He can't take it for much longer. Her eyes have turned to stone. If he puts his finger under her chin to tilt her face up to his, if he looks into her eyes, he sees polished granite. He cannot look deep into her eyes, beyond the shiny flecks, for there
are
no depths, there is only light reflected back, the tiny slivers of his own twin reflections. And the stone eyes gaze past him these days, always past him at the door. Her way out.

He turns on the cold tap and tips the potatoes into the sink. They are tiny new potatoes, prised early from a heavy soil, caked with red clay. He scrubs the potatoes with a brush but the clay is hard. He picks at the scabs of it with his fingers until it softens and comes away. The potatoes slip in his fingers and the water clouds with the dissolved mud. His hands are cold in the water. The floating mud leaves a reddish tide-mark round his wrists.

No use trying to peel these potatoes. He scrapes away at the tender skin, which sticks like wet tissue-paper to his fingers. He scrubs the potatoes hard until they are pale, glistening and bare; pokes out the tiny specks of eyes; and drops them in a pan. He tips the water out of the bowl and watches it flow sluggishly away, the plughole clogged by the wad of muddy skin.

He goes to the window, waiting, wondering whether to begin cooking yet. It is still early for lunch. If he begins cooking now, he might have to keep things warm; the potatoes, the eggs. But if he leaves it, Nadia might return before it is ready and he wants it to be ready. He wants to surprise Nadia with a well-timed, a perfect meal. To prove that he is better. Prove that he is capable, at least, of this gesture.

But what if she doesn't return? What if he is left with the embarrassment of a wasted lunch? Eggs congealed on stiff lumps of spinach, potatoes sad and cold. She might be lunching with a friend. She might be doing anything. There is no reason why she
should
return.

The sunshine is golden, even the green of the leaves in the park is a golden green, as if everything has been blessed. The trees stir, not as if there is a breeze, but as if they are luxuriating in the weather, stretching their leaves like fingers, wriggling with pleasure.

‘Go out,' Nadia said. ‘You can't stay in on such a lovely day.' He is nervous, but she is right. Nadia is always bloody right. Experimentally, he takes his car keys from the hook where they have dangled for weeks. There is a letter he has to post. He could have asked Nadia to post it, but she would have asked questions. It is a letter he wrote weeks ago, when he came to a point of resolve, though not a deep enough resolve to go out and post it. Now he has made the decision. The car keys feel friendly, familiar in his hand. Yes, he has. He'll do that, post the letter and then tell Nadia its content. He cannot guess her reaction. And if it is over between them, which is the message he gets from her stony eyes, if it
is
over, then it is none of her business.

The sun sparkles on the rich green of the rhododendrons in the valley and between them is the shimmering clash of brilliant grass and bluebells. The air above the road far ahead shivers in the heat and the cars wobble out of it on the road before him. The windows of the car are open and Simon's hair is blown back by the rush of hot polleny air. It is strange to be out in this real technicolour world, everything is so wantonly bright and fat and lush. The road spins towards him like a rope someone is letting down to free him. Or like a video game: he is the driver and he has to steer, no matter how fast the road furls up at him he has to steer, and veer, in order to win another life. Where is he going? Wherever it is, he is going too fast. His foot presses down as if it is not real, all this metal and rubber and hot tar road, not real but a simulation. But suddenly another car is there in front of him. He is overtaking another car on a bend and suddenly it is there, this real car, this metal box which holds a real driver. He swerves, avoids collision, almost plunges off the road, wrestles with the steering wheel, pumps his foot on the brake and the car grates to an ugly squealing stop. His heart trampolines in his chest. He stops by the edge of the road on the gravel and leans forward on the steering wheel, his face in his hands.

What he saw was a glimpse of terror on the face in the car he almost hit, man's face, woman's face, he doesn't know. He recognised only the terror.

His heart, which almost let him down, patters and thumps. Eventually it slows so that he can no longer feel it, only imagine it like the regular tail-wag of a faithful dog. His heart will be all right, they told him, no need to worry, carry on as normal, but what the fucking hell is normal, that's what Simon would like to know.

He has stopped near a pub – The Hawk. He gets out of the car and looks up. The sky is a nonchalant blue. That means nothing, it would be just as blue, flaunting its wispy clouds like so much frilly underwear, if he was dead and buried, if he was mangled in a ton of steel. His face is wet, he wipes away whatever it is, the sweat or the tears, and feels the roughness of his cheeks. He could have shaved. Nadia told him to shave. And now here he is, what is he doing
here
with the sky so open and the heat shimmer on the road and the hot smell of tar mingled with the lacy scent of some white flower that grows along the roadside? What is he doing here? What is he doing out at all?

And there is sound everywhere now that the engine has stopped, bird song, insect buzz, whispering leaves and, as he shifts his weight, the sound of his own feet on gravel. A motor bike snarls past, its noise a shock that sets his heart bounding again. He needs to go in. He needs a roof over his head.

The landlady is big and blonde and brittle. Her voice grates as she greets him, but he is comforted by her familiar type. The beer is good, he has not drunk bitter for weeks. Nadia brought some cans of lager home but he could not swallow it, it was like drinking liquid tin. This beer tastes entirely brown and runs down his throat so easily he has to hold himself back from swallowing it all at once. There is a baby's rattle on the bar, and a photograph of a plain, sallow baby in a fancy bonnet pinned on the wall among the darts fixtures.

Nadia has never spoken about Celia's baby, not again. It is there, a small squalling bundle between them, it is always there, in the air, and there it will stay. Nadia dreams about babies, he has heard her muttering. But what can he do? What can he possibly ever say? If there was a way of going back … He licks a rim of froth from his lips. But the past is set now like a swarm of flies in amber and there is no way of freeing it. He has blown it with Nadia and there is not a bloody thing he can do about it. Eggs Florentine!

He swallows the last of his bitter and goes back outside into the sunshine. A group of bikers have congregated outside; their black leather glistens, their polished bikes gleam. He passes them, intimidated by their togetherness, their uniform, their collective gaze, and walks back to his car.

The door is locked. Nadia lets herself in and at once knows the flat is empty. She inhales and stretches, smiling in the luxury of a solitude where it is possible just to let go. She goes into a trance when she is alone in the house, a rhythm of working and wandering around, gazing in the mirror and watching not her face but her ideas, making coffee and leaving it undrunk. With another sensibility in the house, tracking her every move, expecting to be offered coffee, wondering what on earth she's doing in the bathroom, she cannot get into this trance and therefore she cannot properly work.

She breathes easily, glad for Simon that he has gone out in the sunshine. It is over a month since he last went out and today is perfect, the weather safe and golden and blue, the air fragrant and caressing.

There is a postcard from her mother on the mat. She is on a coach trip of the Scottish Highlands. The card shows a salmon leaping up a waterfall, and confirms her intention of visiting Nadia on the way back – tomorrow. Nadia at once notices the grime on the skirting boards, and sticky jamjars begin to jostle in the cupboards of her mind. June will have to sleep on the sofa-bed in the sitting room, which means cleaning in there, under things and behind things – and she winces, thinking of the state of the bathroom. She switches on the radio and puts on her rubber gloves, throws open the windows and sets to work.

Simon does not turn back as he meant to, because of a sudden stream of traffic; he does not want to cut across it and so he joins its flow. This time he drives irreproachably, keeping the bumper of the car ahead at an even distance. He drives out of the valley, rising up on the silvery ribbon of road between the hills. Last time he drove this way it was dark. Not real dark but the dark of surface night. He remembers the grinning moon emerging from between the edges of the ragged clouds. Now he drives towards the cave again. The car ahead of him turns off and suddenly behind him are bikers, a ragged leather stream, gaining on him until for a moment he is surrounded and momentarily blinded by sharp blades of sunshine on chrome. He holds his breath and his hands tighten on the wheel, but they speed off, leave him behind, only an insignificant motorist, they roar away revving and swerving theatrically. And Simon is left feeling lonely now, driving high over the moorland.

Half-grown black-faced lambs follow their mothers, who bustle away from the road at the approach of his car. He stops just off the road in the place he stopped before. He parks and gets out. The first sound he hears is a curlew's cry, and then the insect buzz which is the colour of the moorland air.

He walks down towards the cave entrance. The sky is the same insouciant blue and now a skylark lassoes him with its loop of song. He looks up into the dazzling sky. All this light is an illusion, he knows, because he has seen the darkness. He has seen the darkness that is there behind the light, that is the absence of light, that is the threat. It is the darkness to come. And he knows Roland's last hour. He experienced it himself. A little longer and he would have become stone himself, would have remained in the utter darkness, dissolved his skin and blood and sinew into darkness, left his stone scattered among the stone.

He recalls the seductive rush of the underground river. How easy it would have been to slip into it, join it, because then there would be no decision, no more struggle. There was that root down there, that slender white probe threading its way through miles of crevices in the rock in search of the river. Such force, such soft, insistent force.

He sits on the heather in front of the cave entrance, looking into its coldness. He sits there while the sun warms his skin and his hair. The sun moves in the sky, but Simon does not move. Ants crawl on him, a butterfly settles on his shoulder but he does not see it. He is thinking about Nadia and about the letter he posted, which slipped so easily into the letterbox slot. It was a letter of resignation. He has finished with geography, finished with teaching. That much was easy. But now … he cannot take Nadia's distance. She is pulling herself away, thread by thread, and soon she will be loose.

Last night he sat in front of the television while Nadia worked. What he watched has gone now, the flicker in his memory as shallow as the coloured flicker on the screen. And as he watched, dazed, he was partly aware of Nadia working behind a closed door, her purpose a mute rebuke. And later, in bed, the smell of henna had made him nauseous and he had held his breath as he entered her from behind, turned his face away from the false bright bush. And she had lain still, hardly even breathing as far as he could tell, only moving his fingers away when he tried to touch her. She had said nothing and sleep had muffled his sadness like a heavy feather pillow.

And what is he to do, now? There is no going back. He heaves himself up, stiff with hours of sitting, slapping at the flies that have settled on his sweater. How long has he been sitting? He's lost track, no watch, weeks since he wore his watch. There is a simple way to be out of it. He walks towards the cave entrance. There is that way. He cheated the earth before. After all, the earth won, fair and square. It beat him. That squashing stone … he breathes in, fills his lungs with a gasp at the memory. It is only because others risked their own lives that he is here at all. He could, perhaps he should, play fair. Now, like this, on a golden day when the air is warm and complex with the smells and songs of spring, he could leave and join Roland. This is his choice now. The two ways, the dark door – slit – silly gaping mouth – that leads to the dark, or the bright road that rises up over the moor like a silver string. Leading where?

Roland is stuck for ever, arrested in the coldness of utter dark. Poor sod. No, that is not for Simon. That would be the easy thing now – the quickest relief. Simon stands up and flexes his legs and arms, feels the warm flux of blood. He goes to the cave mouth and breathes in the dead mushroom smell. No. It is not for him – that cold intimacy. The sun is warm on his hair, he strokes it, the back of his own head, feels the slight coarseness, the warmth against his hand, hair, skin and skull. He is a live and separate thing.

‘Goodbye,' he whispers, and then says more loudly, calls into the gloom, ‘Goodbye.' There is the faint beat of an echo after his voice like a distant reply. Simon turns away, closing his eyes briefly, wondering whether it is Roland that he is bidding farewell, or something else.

Nadia lifts the lid of the saucepan. There are potatoes, scrubbed and yellowish under a starchy scum of water. She blinks, puzzled, replaces the lid. The kitchen floor is damp, the insides of the windows clean, the food lined up neatly on clean shelves. The cleanliness makes her light-hearted, as if something dusty within herself has been wiped. But Simon has been gone for hours. There is no note. She remembers with a shudder the last time he left a note. She notices that the car has gone, tries to recall what he said this morning. He didn't mention going out. She suggested it, and as he nodded a little skin of insincerity filmed his eyes. He didn't plan to go out then, she's sure. What did he say? He asked her not to go, that was it. The lightness leaks from her heart. He asked her not to go and she did, just to escape his need. She switches on the kettle for a cup of tea, hoping that Simon will be back soon, wondering whether the potatoes are supposed to be some sort of sign, chasing out the small thread of worry. She wanted him out, didn't she?