Married Love (11 page)

He was trying to pick one of his fights over politics: about some company Jim said was only a TGS subsidiary anyway.

— Nobody’s allowed to spoil my party mood, said Jim. — Don’t even let him get started.

Peggy was drawing out long strands of the Pune’s hair, tugging at them. — What about me? she said, in a fake-pleading voice. — Don’t I do good? Haven’t I done good to you, ungrateful boy?

— As I’m sure you’re aware, Jim went on, — European Community sanctions prohibit the export of any military hardware to South Africa.

— But you export them to an Italian firm, which sells them on.

— Don’t be simple-minded. It’s not the manufacturers who make the wars.

— That’s debatable, said one of Peggy’s friends from school.

— Decent jobs and economic stability are more use to them than your pure fucking thoughts.

— I don’t have any pure thoughts, said the Pune. — Only fucking ones.

Peggy started pushing at him, to roll him off her lap. — Go away, you’re being horrid. I don’t like you very much tonight.

— You sound just like my mother.

— I’m beginning to sympathise with your mother.

Kristen stepped backwards out of the light, into the shadow of the oil tank: no one saw her vanish. From her new perspective, the purple clematis flowers growing thick on the trellis loomed suddenly momentous against the party-glow; the grown-up talk dropped into blurred lively noise, as if she had crossed a frontier. On her side of it was the night-quiet, a bird blundering in the bushes,
a
dank breath of earth, a rattle when her skirt caught on the shiny laurel leaves. She hadn’t brought out her torch; when she turned to follow the path back past the bike shed into the wood, the blackness at first was like a wall preventing her. After a few moments’ staring, it melted into grey, seeped into by the light of the party behind. Imagining being blind, with her eyes strained open and her hands feeling out all round her, lifting her knees high in case she stumbled, she made her way cautiously past the shed and then on into the denser dark of the wood. Tom would have remembered the torch.

At one point she pitched forward over a root, then crawled for a few yards on her hands and knees, her own breathing sounding in her ears as if it was someone else’s. Arriving at the back end of the greenhouse, she had to feel her way round to the front through clumps of nettles; the door when she pulled it open screamed like an animal. At the end of all these trials, it seemed against the odds that the candle would really be where she had left it, or that she would have thought to bring matches; but she put her hands on both of them easily.

The flare of light was a miracle. Careless of hot wax, she planted the lit candle in a pot of crumbled earth; the flame reflected liquidly on glass panes, enclosing her in the blackness outside. Her hands and knees were muddy and the skin on her legs was coming up in red welts from the nettles. She sat on the tiled floor in a thin layer of chill rising from the earth beneath, distinct from the held-in day’s warmth under the glass; warily she swallowed a mouthful of the sherry, then ate one slice of
lemon
fridge cake, although she had eaten some already, in her bedroom. She felt herself going through the motions of the adventures a child might have – in an artificial, nostalgic way, because she wasn’t really a child any more. You couldn’t be, once you were thinking about what you were doing as childish.

Once, she and Tom had pushed aside the heavy lid of the well and dropped stones into it, to see if it was deep: it was deep enough to fall into, but there hadn’t been any water in it, only a blind disappointing bottom of debris whose colour had decayed to rotten brown. The effects of the sherry began to flood through her; she swallowed more mouthfuls, tasting through the sweetness the plastic lip of the toy flask. When she became aware of the noise of someone approaching through the wood, it took her a few moments to feel properly afraid: at first she thought it might be Tom, back from his friends’ house, but the sounds were too indefinite, too blundering. It could be anyone, any stranger or madman. Guiltily she shrank: she shouldn’t be out here alone, burning a candle.

Someone called out for her. — Kristie?

It wasn’t her father either.

She waited, to be sure, for the Pune’s shape to detach itself from the surrounding darkness and lurch into view in the greenhouse doorway. — It had to be you, he said. — I saw a light shining through the trees. I was drowning, wandering round in the dark out there.

The greenhouse was invaded by his awkward height and limbs; she felt an outraged pang for her lost loneliness.
He
dropped to sit cross-legged opposite her in the narrow space. — It stinks of booze in here. What are you drinking?

— Sherry.

— Extraordinary. Is there any left?

Silently she handed him the flask. He drank from it, wiped the top, then handed it back as if for her turn; she was almost indignant that he didn’t query whether it was sensible for her to be drinking, at her age. After a moment’s hesitation she swigged deeply.

— This is nice, he said. — I never noticed there was a greenhouse before.

He got out his Golden Virginia tobacco tin and began rolling up by candlelight, not an ordinary cigarette but one of the druggy ones Tom specially resented, with something sprinkled in it out of a little bag. (— Our parents could be arrested, you know, Tom said, — for allowing this to go on under their roof.) The drink’s strong effect coiled powerfully in Kristen, pushing out of her mouth in words a thought she hardly knew she’d had.

— I suppose you and my mum are having a lovers’ tiff.

He flicked his lighter and sucked in his cheeks, shaking back his hair, drawing flame into his raggedy cigarette; after the first deep pull into his lungs, he turned it round in his fingers to admire it. — We’re not actually lovers, he said in a strangulated voice, holding the smoke in. — Not in the sense of sexual consummation. I don’t think she’d ever really let me near her. Anyway I never dared try, in case she turned me down. D’you want some?

He held out the cigarette to Kristen.

— No thank you, she said, her cheeks burning primly.

— But I suppose we have had a tiff. I’m in a mess over your mother. I can’t seem to cope unless I’ve got her around, and I’m terrified she’ll take herself away. Then I say precisely the things that make her most angry.

Kristen seemed to be in a moon-terrain where naked facts lay around for anyone to find.

— So why not just take yourself away instead?

He didn’t notice she was being rude. — Don’t imagine I haven’t thought of that. But I’m weak, pathetically weak. He closed his eyes and yawned, leaning his head back against the brick ledge. — I could be happy, in a place like this. It’s nice in here.

— There’s a well, you know.

— A real well?

— But no water in it. Tom and I looked.

— You didn’t bring out any food?

Kristen gave the Pune the second slice of lemon fridge cake, she ate an apple down to its stalk, they finished the sherry. He described some film he’d seen, where angels came to earth, and one of them fell in love with an acrobat and took on mortal form to be with her. He was just the same as when he was an angel, except that there was a bald patch in his hair and his clothes didn’t suit him. — But it was all worth it, the Pune said. — In exchange for mortal love. So the film said. What do you think?

(Tom said afterwards that he’d heard of this film, and it was pretentious crap.)

— I don’t know, said Kristen.

He yawned again. — Go and tell Peggy I’m out here.
Tell
her I need her, tell her I’m in a state, tell her I’m going to do something desperate.

— I’ll have to take the candle, she warned him.

Walking back to the party, she held up her curved hand to shield the candle flame from the draught of her movement. She did deliver the Pune’s message, but not to Peggy.

— Simon’s in the greenhouse, she said to Jim when she met him.

He was piling up his plate from the wrecked remains of the buffet set out on the dining table. In the front room Peggy was dancing to ‘Because the Night’ (her favourite), with the artist who’d drawn the bosoms Kristen and Tom had stolen years ago.

— Simon? What greenhouse? You mean our old greenhouse?

— He wants Mum to go out to him. He says he needs her.

— He can go fuck himself, said Jim. — Excuse my French, Pigeon.

— Are you going to tell her?

— No, I don’t think I am.

Then Kristen went upstairs to her bedroom, and changed into her pyjamas. All the time she was nursing her drunkenness as tenderly as if it was the candle flame, carrying herself upright, planting one foot in front of another, choosing small sensible words that she could hold like little stones in her mouth. She used the bathroom, stood up and was slightly sick into the toilet, washed her hands and cleaned her teeth, stretched back her lips and
bared
her teeth at her image in the cabinet mirror. Switching off the light in her bedroom, she stood at the window looking out; one of the paper lanterns in the trees had caught fire and was blazing up, the flare illuminating a pale mass of leaves shocked out of night-time invisibility. She had left Simon by himself, out in the greenhouse in the dark: it was a triumph in their Punic Wars.

And then she was leaping and pounding back across the grass and into the wood, mounds of breasts bouncing under her pyjamas, hardly noticing the sharp sticks and rocks that cut at her bare feet.

The Pune couldn’t really have thrown himself in the well. A child might just about fall into it, but it wasn’t wide enough for an adult, they would only get stuck if they tried: she pictured his feet sticking up out of the well and waving around, a sob of breathy derision ripped her chest. Anyway, it hadn’t been all that far down to the dry bottom when she and Tom had looked, only ten feet or so, perhaps not that much. The torch beam – she had remembered, this time, to snatch the torch from Tom’s room on her way out – jagged and bobbed in front of her as she ran, breath hiccuping in her ears; she trained it at the rough ground ahead, leaping over roots and dodging past the old wheelbarrow tipped on its side, a broken go-kart.

But there were other ways to die. Some awful tearing heaving noise came from the dark greenhouse as the torch beam found it, catching first on the rusting ornate pinnacle of the gable above the door, then reflecting off filthy panes
overgrown
with ivy. The iron frame shook. Through the glass, quenching her in horror, Kristen seemed to see a black shape hanging; then at the shape’s centre suddenly, as if a spirit struggled out, a small light bloomed and spurted.

Kristen had forgotten that the Pune had his lighter.

She stepped into the doorway.

— Hello, he said. — Don’t tell me. She wouldn’t come.

— I didn’t say anything to her. She was busy dancing.

— Don’t worry. She wouldn’t have come anyway.

— Are you OK?

— You were wrong. Look: there is water in it.

She should have recognised the noise she heard: he had been heaving aside the great stone that covered the entrance to the well, more easily than she and Tom had moved it, both pushing together. He was holding up his lighter over the opening; she tilted down her torch beam. Light slid on slick black, nearer to the top than she was expecting.

— But it really was dry, when we looked.

— It’ll be a spring. They can dry up in a drought and then come back again. Find something to throw down.

Kristen remembered seaside pebbles, lined up along the windowsill; when they dropped them in, one at a time, the well swallowed them with an intimate small wet gulp, an old sound not given out for years. The Pune stared after them. His face was washed in the light shining back from the well’s surface: the long slanting lines of his cheekbones, the pits of his eye-hollows, the gathered concentration.

He and Kristen exchanged smiles of satisfaction.

HIS SISTER CHANGED
her relationship status on Facebook to single. Alec didn’t do Facebook, but he checked on hers fairly often, because there were only the two of them, no one else to look out for her (one parent dead and one a mess). It probably meant nothing; she was always falling out with this latest boyfriend. Alec thought the boyfriend was no good. He texted Emmie anyway.

All that morning, his faint consciousness of worry floated against the greenish Venice light. He was staying in a residential centre, a modern block attached to a monastery on San Giorgio; it had been raining for days, he had to dry his wet clothes by hanging them along the lukewarm radiators in his room. Tourists in gondolas draped themselves under the blue tarpaulins, the front of St Mark’s fumed, pavements were awash or greasy with salt spray; he had imagined that flood water must wash over out of the canals, but it seemed to seep out of the foundations of the buildings. The water in the Grand Canal flowed
undulating
and fast, glaucous green; the famous facades withdrew, forbidding, behind their winter veil of rain. As Alec hurried under his umbrella, his writing about the paintings seemed a heat source inside him like the blood reds of the paint, less mental than visceral.

He switched his phone off while he was working in the archives in the Frari, turned it on again when he came out – startled, after receding so far inside the study room’s velvety quiet, at being buffeted again by the weather in the bustling, splashy, narrow
calle
. The light smoked and was brownish, reflecting off the high walls in the rain. His Italian wasn’t really good enough for deciphering the old documents; he was afraid he had wasted this morning, his last morning. And there was nothing on his phone from Em. Usually she was quick to get back to him; she spent too much time on her iPhone, hunkered angular on the floor in coloured thick tights and lace-up boots, presiding over the realm of her connections. Finely made, with narrow wrists and fingers, delicate ears, she was only twenty-two; when she was fifteen, she’d once taken an overdose of pills. She was pretty like a doll, with black hair cut in a short bob, and a strained, wide, eager smile. Alec had asked her what she saw in this latest guy. — Sex, she’d said, deliberately to embarrass him and shut him up. — Not everyone’s an intellectual like you.