Married Love (20 page)

She had been afraid, of course, but not sorry, not at the time. He was as moody and skinny as a boy, but he had a power that drew all the yearning in the place towards him, including hers. He’d hardly spoken to her before that, but he must have noticed her watching him. His real
presence
in her room had seemed a kind of miracle, refracted and thickened through everyone’s adulation of him, through his pictures in magazines and on album covers. He’d been pretty high that night, exalted and weird; there were a lot of drugs around that summer. He’d said all kinds of strange things – Hilda was surprised that he could remember any of it afterwards, but quite a lot of it had found its way into the song.

Hilda told her the real name of the singer-songwriter and Ally didn’t recognise it. A crumb of apple cake had stuck to Hilda’s cheek as she talked. She was at that tipping point in middle age. Mostly she was animated, buoyant, and flexible, her skin was good, and in spite of her white hair she seemed to belong to the world of choice and strength. Then in some trick of the light, or because she sagged her chin into her wrinkling neck, or her too-short trousers rode up above her ankle socks as she was sitting cross-legged, Ally saw for a moment the old woman she would become, vulnerable and stubborn, cut adrift. Ally knew about the sixties – hippies and psychedelia and free love – but they seemed actually less real to her than Victorian times. If Hilda had said that she’d seen Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost tapping at the window, it would have had more of a thrill of possibility.

— It was a kind of rape. It was child abuse. But that wasn’t how I saw it at the time. Later, in the seventies, I got very angry about it.

— What d’you think about it now?

— When I was trying to write the novel, I made such
an
effort to remember it exactly. I played all the old music. Of course, it can’t mean anything to you. How could I convey the power of those people? That was it, that was my failure – I couldn’t convey it. But it was real. It happened. It was almost a physical thing – you couldn’t separate out the music and the giftedness and the youth. There was like a hum of sex in the air all the time.

Ally made an effort to imagine Hilda as a fifteen-year-old, but even the room they were in made this difficult. Its uncompromising style conveyed the whole long adult effort of putting a life together. Hilda said that, in her twenties, the story of what had happened had blocked her; for years she hadn’t been able to get past the cheat or the promise of it. She hadn’t told anyone about it, certainly not her mother, not even her husband. She’d saved it up. She’d told herself that one day she would put it in a book, not to make a scandal – as if anyone would care! – but just to be finally free of it. And once she’d begun to think of it as a story it had stopped troubling her; the idea of writing it had even come to be a comfort to her in bad times, a resource stored inside her, opening possibilities in the future.

— But it was a dud, she said. — It was a wrong idea. I couldn’t do it. What I wanted to say died on me. It died inside.

Hilda gave Ally a key to the cottage.

— You can come here any time, if you need space. Make yourself a fire if I’m not here. Grab what you like to eat.
Tilly
will love to see you – she hates to be locked up in the house alone.

Ally took the key, but couldn’t imagine that she’d ever need it. Then one afternoon when things were bad at home – trouble was blowing up around James’s refusing to go to school – she drove to the cottage and let herself in. She told her mother that she was walking Hilda’s dog, as a favour. She did take Tilly out, and then when they got back she made a fire and wrapped herself in the blanket and picked out one of the books from Hilda’s shelves, losing herself in it so completely and deeply that when Hilda came back from work, pushing open the door, Ally looked up startled and didn’t know for a moment where she was. After that, she started calling in at the cottage once or twice a week; sometimes Hilda was home and sometimes Ally was alone there. When Hilda went to Dundee for the weekend, to stay with her daughter who had cats, Ally slept at the cottage overnight, keeping Tilly company.

One evening when she and Hilda were sharing a bottle of red wine, she explained what Ryan had done to kill himself, hanging himself on the stairs using a length of spare washing line. She’d never had to tell anyone this before: either they knew already or they didn’t like to ask, but Hilda had come straight out with it. They were sitting staring at each other from opposite ends of the sofa, with their legs tucked under them; the dog in her basket was panting with pleasure in the warmth of the fire.

— Mum would have found him, Ally said. — Usually she gets home twenty minutes before my dad, except that
day
on an impulse she went the roundabout way to buy vegetables at the farm shop. I was away in Manchester. My other brother had football after school. It wouldn’t have made any difference to what happened – there was no chance of stopping him or anything. He had died already, hours before. But it meant that Mum didn’t have to find him. Dad found him instead. Dad said that that was the only saving grace in the whole thing, her buying those vegetables.

The wine made little waves in her glass, in time with the pounding of her heart. Hilda reached over to pull the blanket up around Ally’s shoulders.

— Did you have any idea that he was so depressed?

— Now when we go over the music he was playing, and what he put on Facebook, everything suggests it. At the time we just thought he was going through a phase. In fact he was just going through a phase. Only, stupid moron, he didn’t leave himself any chance to come out of it.

— It’s a terrible thing for his girlfriend, Hilda sighed. — It really fucks her up.

Ally couldn’t bear the idea that Hilda would imagine Yvonne as something she wasn’t, some kind of tragic heroine. — They were always splitting up and getting back together again, working themselves up into a lather of feeling, one way or another. It didn’t mean anything.

— But that’s what you think love’s all about when you’re a kid.

— That kind of love makes me sick. It’s such a fake.

When Hilda came back from Dundee she brought Ally
a
stone she’d picked up on a beach there, oval and flat and black, striped with pinkish crystal. — Pounded by the North Sea, she said. In Hilda’s house it was a beautiful thing, but it only looked odd among the ornaments on her bedroom shelf at home, as if a piece of outdoors had got indoors by mistake.

One morning when Ally was at the writing centre, double-checking the details of next year’s programme of courses before they sent it off to press, Yvonne turned up, hovering outside the office door. Ally recognised her through the glass before she saw Ally inside: it was a fine day, brilliantly cold, so that blue sky was patched in the frame of the door behind Yvonne’s yellow hair and short white bomber jacket. Her shoulders were hunched with the cold, her skinny midriff bare, hardly bulging over the top of tight jeans. She put her face up close to the glass, peering in. Ally felt like a fish in a bowl, helpless to escape being seen.

— I have to talk to you, Yvonne said once she’d got the door open, looking around suspiciously and showing no sign of wanting to cross the threshold of the office.

No ‘please’ or ‘if you’re not busy’.

Ally took down her coat and suggested they walk along the river. She left a note on the desk for Kit. It was the second day of a short-story course, and all the students were on the loose outdoors with notebooks and pens. They must have been given some writing exercise. Everywhere you looked, one of them seemed to be staring at nothing, drinking it in, transfixed: a dead stalk of dock weed or the blank corner of a stone wall or an icicle dribbled from
the
lip of a gutter. Dedicatedly they scribbled in their notebooks, squinting at the nothing from all angles.

— Shit a brick, muttered Yvonne, keeping her eyes on the ground. — What are they supposed to be doing?

Ally felt bound to apologise for the centre. She said that they were practising observational skills.

— Observing my arse, Yvonne said.

Her thin little face which had used to look creamy, was peaky, blue around the lips. Ally had always guessed that underneath Yvonne’s neat sweetness – plucked straight brows, small nose, pink ears – something ferrety was waiting to appear. Yvonne walked rolling on her heels with her arms wrapped across her chest, hands tucked up into her jacket sleeves for warmth. The path dropped to the river and she looked around her, not enthusiastically, as if she didn’t often find herself in the country. Bare alders and ash and blackthorn made a twiggy haze against the sun, which was already close to dropping behind the steep side of the river valley; the cold tea-brown water coiled thickly in its bed. Ally felt better once they were past the last of the writers.

— Everybody hates me, Yvonne said. — I suppose that’s what he wanted.

— We’ve been over all this, said Ally. — Nobody hates you.

Yvonne fished for something in her tight jeans pocket, thrust it out closed in her fist. — I wanted to give you this back.

Ally put her hands behind her. — I don’t want it. What is it?

— A stupid ring Ryan gave me.

— I don’t want it.

In a spasm of temper Yvonne swung around and opened her hand, flinging away into the river something tiny that gave out one glint of light before it was swallowed without a splash, the water healing instantly behind it. The moment she’d done it she shrieked, pressing her hands across her mouth, and said that she hadn’t meant to let it go, it was an accident.

— Ally, help me get it back!

— Don’t be silly. The water’s too deep. You couldn’t find it in a million years. It doesn’t matter.

Yvonne went on shrieking and pleading. Crouching on the path she started untying her trainers, dragging and clawing at the laces as if she were going to wade in. On an impulse, because the whole scene disgusted her, Ally found herself calmly stepping into the river with her trainers still on, wading across the large flat submerged stones at its edge. At first she hardly felt the cold, only the pull of the moving water as if something were clamped around her ankles. Then she stepped down into a deeper channel, among the smaller toffee-coloured pebbles of the river bed; the water here was halfway up to her calves, then up to her knees, soaking her trousers, wrapping them against her legs, snatching her breath away with the shock of the cold. The force of the current where the river ran faster almost knocked her off balance, though it looked lazy on the surface. She steadied herself by hanging on to a slippery boulder sticking up midstream and wondered if she should go any farther. Her jaw was clenched. It was
difficult
to remember how to move her feet in the trainers that began to feel numbingly huge and heavy.

She didn’t care about the ring: she had stepped into the water only to make a point against the hysterical performance on the riverbank, to show it up in some way that was deliberate and disdainful. When she turned to look back at Yvonne, she was surprised at how far she had come: Yvonne on the path seemed distant, hugging her elbows, shouting directions that Ally couldn’t hear over the water rushing past. It seemed a different universe out here in the river. The whole scene, the sad story that had brought them together, was framed for her for a moment as if from some far-off future perspective, and her rage against Yvonne washed out of her. Wanting only to be kind, she began hunting for the ring in all seriousness, peering at the river bed, fishing for gleams in the water, her hands aching from the cold as if the flesh were being dragged off her bones. She realised that Yvonne was shouting from the bank for her to come back, please come back. It didn’t matter, Yvonne shouted. It was only a ring.

At that moment Ally saw it, caught just underwater in a crevice in a jagged chunk of shale, its gold picked out where a beam of the late light slanted at an angle from the water’s surface. She put out her hand to take it. And when she had it safe in her clenched fingers, she waded with some difficulty back to where Yvonne was reaching out for her. (—You stupid mad fuck, Yvonne stormed. — What did you think you were doing?) She didn’t drown.

AFTER THE SEX
, he fell asleep. That wasn’t what Linda had expected. Cheated – returned too soon into her own possession – she lay pinned for a while under his flung arm, looking into the corners of the high ceiling where purple shadows bloomed and a flossy strand of cobweb kept time in a draught she couldn’t feel. She liked his flat, what she’d seen of it, better than her own. Books were piled everywhere on the floor, a tide of curiosities was flooded through the rooms in disorder: bird skulls, netsuke, fossils, Christmas cracker jokes pinned on a noticeboard, little animated toys his children had made (he was divorced with two teenage boys), postcard Hammershoi, a marimba, an original nineteenth-century tin zoetrope – an early machine for making moving pictures. (He’d shown her how it worked, she’d been afraid then in case they were carried past the moment when something other than companionable chat was possible.) Photographs of cave paintings everywhere. Her own home was too poky and
timid
and smothered with tending. And where did he have the money from, to rent a flat in Bloomsbury? (She was in Tottenham.)

But she wasn’t in love, though she had been ready to be. Love sank down gently from where it had been swollen in expectation – she imagined a red balloon deflating to a foolish remnant. Lightly, he snored. He was jet-lagged, he’d flown back only yesterday from South Africa. Politely, she eased from underneath his weight. There was only this substantial moment really, for all the sticky trickle on her thighs, and their bodies’ forms and smells imprinted recently and urgently upon each other: of mutually uncomprehending encounter. She didn’t dislike his body, although she had been two inches taller than he was when they were standing up. He was compact, commanding, energetic; careless of his appearance, balding, with a remainder of fine auburn hair. His spirit was in his blue prominent eyes; now they were closed, lids flickering with dream-life, she was released to perceive him with detachment.