“Yes, but . . .”
“What?”
There’s too much to say. If I start to say it I might never stop.
“Please will you call me Livvy? When you call me Olivia it makes me feel like I’m in trouble.”
Whatever he calls me, there’s no doubt I am in trouble. The very fact I couldn’t bear to sacrifice the moment to hear the truth is all the proof I need.
“Livvy it is,” he says, giving me a smile that warms me. “Come next door, we’ll be more comfortable.”
We end up on a long, maroon sofa in the living room, loomed over by an enormous mahogany cabinet full of priceless-looking china. There’s a scattering of occasional tables, littered with more silver-framed family pictures and a TV that looks like it was bought in the late eighties. As he drops soft kisses down my neck I have to twist my face away to stop my gaze catching his wedding picture, his smile of joy radiating out of the frame—and next to him Sally, that smile that I could swear doesn’t quite translate. Why am I doing this? I sit up sharply, winded.
“Just . . .”
“I’m sorry,” he says, sitting up straight, starting to recover himself. I can see that encroaching tide of guilt rolling toward us like a tsunami, but something inside me wants to stem it a little longer. It’s me who kisses him this time, who pulls him toward me, who feels a different tide start to rise up and take him. It’s as if we make a silent agreement to quiet down the voices for a while, to simply exist within the moment, our kisses all the feeling that we need. If I could abandon fully it would be heaven—I’d be shedding clothes as naturally as a snake slithers from its skin—but of course I can’t. He pauses, sensing it, and pulls me into his chest. I love how safe I feel here, even if I know that it’s illusory.
I stroke his stubble, unable to find any words that won’t make the situation worse.
“I like . . .” he starts, then pauses, fingers playing with the neck of my madly unglamorous stripy sweater. I try not to feel inadequate at the thought of all those silken, seductive outfits that are lying unworn in the barn.
“What are you trying to say?”
He twists round and looks down at me, a smile on his face.
“I suppose what I’m trying to say is how can something so wrong feel so right?”
“You’ve totally missed your calling, you realize. You should be writing country and western songs.”
“I know, it’s deeply unjust. Why don’t they have graduate training programs for jobs like that?”
We hold each other’s gaze, so much going unsaid, and then he kisses me again, more fervent than before. I lose track of time as his hands gently caress my body, never venturing too far, but never stopping their exploration.
“Do you think you’ve found your calling?” he asks me, propping himself up on one elbow. I stop to think about it.
“I feel grateful to be doing something fun,” I say.
“When you describe it it sounds more like the fun’s in principle.”
“No, it isn’t,” I insist, a little defensively.
“This is just a blundering observation, but it’s when you talk about the writing I see you light up. Have you heard back about your story yet?”
“No, nothing,” I say, embarrassed. “Anyway, it was like getting blood out of a stone.” It was until I let myself go, poured all of this sharp truth into it. “I’m not a natural.
Don’t you think that’s a page one requirement for your calling?”
“They say that about me sometimes,” he says, gruffly embarrassed.
“I’m sure you are.”
“But I certainly don’t feel it’s my calling. Or maybe it is my calling. No one ever promised your calling would be something you liked. It might just be the place where you can make the greatest contribution.”
His voice changes as he says it, as if he’s parroting someone else’s words. My eyes slip, unconsciously, toward a picture of his beakish father placed pride of place on the occasional table.
“Of course it is! That’s why it’s your calling. It’s your heart’s desire.” He looks at me like I’m the village idiot, and I reach up and grab his face, which is becoming increasingly handsome to me as time goes on. “Go on then, Kenny Rogers, what would you do if you could do anything in the world?”
He pauses, looks away. He’s ashamed, I think.
“Tell me,” I say, more gentle.
“I’d be a gardener.” I try not to laugh, imagining him in a pair of denim dungarees, tilling the earth. “Proper gardening, landscaping. I designed that whole vegetable garden, planted it with my own fair hands,” he says, holding them up. He’s actually got lovely hands, well turned without being effeminate. He shrugs. “It’s nonsense, of course.”
“It’s not nonsense. If it’s really what you want to do.”
“You’re sweet,” he says, kissing me on the nose.
I lose all sense of time lying there in his arms—or rather, I throw it away, conscious that this sweet moment of
intimacy, laced as it is with a strange kind of naivety, will not be something that we can keep hold of. Right now I feel like I can ask him anything, and so I do.
“What did she say about me, William? Did she really say we drifted apart?” He pauses, the cogs whirring, and I trace his temples with my fingertips. “Just tell me the truth. I can take it.”
“You’re not how I thought you’d be.”
I feel myself tensing.
“Neither are you.”
“Touché,” he says, smiling. We’re quiet for a couple of minutes, both of us holding back our cards.
“She said you were the best friend she ever had, but it got too intense.” He pauses, watching my face, I think to see how far he should go. “She said you had a terrific row, and she couldn’t ever forget what you’d said. She tried, but it wasn’t quite the same, and you didn’t seem to want her in your life.”
I shudder at the very memory of it, but I shudder more at her blatant reframing of events to cast herself as the innocent victim.
“That’s not fair,” I protest, shaking my head, blood coursing through me. “I don’t want to go into it all now, but . . . she dumped me.”
I hate that even after all these years, when I talk about Sally I still resort to the language of lovers without missing a beat.
“She was thrilled when you sent the card, after she hadn’t heard back from the wedding invitation.”
“She didn’t
invite
me to the wedding,” I say, my voice rising despite myself. I wish I hadn’t started this conversation. He doesn’t contradict me, but I can see in his eyes that he’s not convinced.
“I thought you saw each other in England, when Madeline was small. I could almost swear she told me so. It was the card you sent that made us give her your name. She promised me she’d call you when she was home, rather than simply crying about it.”
“She cried?”
“Oh yes. She was overcome.”
“It must have been sleep deprivation,” I say, then curse myself for my insensitivity. I can sense his retreat, even if he doesn’t withdraw his body from mine. I shouldn’t be asking him to choose between our versions of events, not now when he must feel so guilty about holding me in his arms.
“She struggled, Olivia. I don’t think friendship was always easy for her, she felt so much. Even with Mara—I saw it dropping off in the months before she died.”
“I know,” I say, trying to make good. “And when she was on form she was the best friend I’ve ever had.”
It’s true. She was.
The atmosphere shifts a little after that: how could it not? About half an hour later, William looks down at me.
“I’m exhausted,” he says, and I feel myself withdraw, so cripplingly unsure of my place. “Don’t worry, you’ll be quite safe. Just as you said, there’s plenty of spare bedrooms.”
I follow him up the stairs, not feeling safe at all. Most of all I don’t feel safe from me.
“Where are you going to sleep?” I venture.
“Ma’s only made up the one room, so I thought I’d give you that, and sleep in here,” he says, indicating his boyhood bedroom.
But somehow we’re miraculously transported inside, squashed into his narrow single bed, so close that we’re almost one entity, the awkwardness of the last hour having melted away. Perhaps the room entraps us in its teenage innocence: we strip down only as far as our underwear and sleep entwined, my head nestled into his bare chest. If only we could stay here indefinitely, floating in this bubble—the outside world poses far too great a risk for our fragile hearts.
I hardly sleep a wink. My thoughts are churning, my body squashed against William’s unfamiliar bulk, the intimacy of it almost painful. I can smell him, male and unfamiliar, feel the soft hair that mats his body, and yet, once the reassuring stream of conversation has stopped, every shred of me screams that I’ve committed a crime. I drift into a fitful sleep in the wee small hours, then wake what feels like five minutes later to find William surreptitiously easing himself out of the bed.
“Don’t get up,” he whispers, “I’ll be back very soon.”
I must slip back under, because when I wake again, an attractive sliver of drool escaping from the left side of my mouth, he’s reappeared. He’s sitting at a desk at the far end of the landing, fully dressed, with his laptop open. I sit up, wrapping the bedspread around my body, cripplingly self-conscious.
“Hello. Where did you go?”
“Mass.”
“Church?” I say, trying not to sound like a heathen. I picture him in the confessional, pouring out the sin of letting another woman into his bed, or on his knees, begging Sally for forgiveness. How could I have done this?
“I try to go most Sundays,” he says, matter-of-fact. He’s sitting up, ramrod straight, dressed in a shirt, as if he’s been transplanted on a magic carpet straight from the office. And yet, despite the invisible fence he’s built around himself, something still stirs in me as I look at him. My heart opens to him, the first insistent tremors of a feeling that could engulf me if I gave in to it. I can almost hear Sally’s laugh ringing in my ears, the way she’d mock me instead of felling me with a clean right hook. She’d laugh at me now, I’m sure of it. I pull the covers tight around me and swing myself out of bed.
“I just need to find a bathroom.”
“There’s one up here. Third on the left,” he says, his gaze pulling toward his e-mails.
I scuttle around the back of him, the bedspread tripping me up, last night’s clothes screwed up in a tight bundle under my arm. I slosh my body with the feeble jet that emerges from the shower extension that hangs from the claw-footed bath, water more cold than hot, soaping myself with a bar of Pears that I find on the sink. Despite the inadequacy of the pressure I try and get into every crevice of my body, wanting so much to feel sparkling and bright, then dry myself piecemeal with a hand towel. The fact I have to put on yesterday’s outfit is a major drawback; I didn’t even like it then: it protested too much with its willful androgyny, a message
from my conscious to my subconscious that I should stay vigilant. My face looks drawn and plain in the mirror, the few scraps of makeup I have marooned in the bottom of my handbag down in the kitchen. I’d do anything for a change of clothes, acutely aware of the irony of those endless, perfect outfits that lie quarantined in the barn.
When I open the door, William is standing in the hallway holding out a cup and saucer.
“I made you tea,” he says, handing it to me. I’m sure it’s just that the mugs are dirty, but to me it feels like a tiny step backward into that cloying formality. “And I also went to the farm shop. We’ve got eggs, among other things.”
“That’s great, though I really should start making tracks soon. I’m assuming a cab . . .”
I hope he doesn’t think I hate him. I hope even more that he doesn’t think the opposite.
“The auto club has been here, so there are no problems on that front,” he says, setting off down the stairs. He hasn’t touched me once, not even brushed my fingers when he passed me the cup.
The kitchen table is scattered with papers, and I hide behind them as he scrambles eggs and fries bacon. When he lays a plate down in front of me, he holds my gaze.
“There’s something I need to ask you.”
My whole body freezes, waiting for the blow.
“I won’t tell anyone, if that’s what you mean.”
I hate how sharp I sound, my guilt turned acid.
“It wasn’t that,” he says, shaking his head. “I actually wanted to ask if you’d consider becoming Madeline’s
godmother. We’re going to have the christening in November, back in . . .” he falters, “in the church. Sally would have approved of my choice, I’m sure.”
“Even after last night?”
The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. He looks down, embarrassed.
“She never forgot you.” It wasn’t what I asked. Does he not feel the same throb of guilt that thrums through every shred of me? Or did last night mean so little to him that he can simply shake it off like a dusting of dandruff on an old man’s collar?
I almost say no, I really do, but then I realize, that for all the complications, I don’t want to. I care about Madeline, and if I can help make the next few years less bleak, then I should at least try. Is it more than that though? Is it the sense of an enduring connection, however painful it may turn out to be?
“Why wasn’t she christened when she was a baby?” I say, the thought suddenly striking me.
William pauses.
“We never quite got around to it,” he says, carefully.
Is this what you even wanted, Sally? Am I adding another piece to a structure that’s being built over your very bones?
“If you’re sure,” I say, the questions catching in my throat. “I’d be honored. I know Lola would too though . . . I don’t want you to feel obligated.”
I’m meant to be seeing her in a couple of weeks, our first meeting since the funeral. I was looking forward to it before last night.
“I don’t,” he says, simply. “Now why don’t you get stuck into those eggs before they go stone cold?”
My heart sinks lower and lower over the next hour, the easy intimacy of last night seeming like a delusion. I’ve already tried to talk about it, and been rebuffed. Besides, my feelings are so contradictory and infuriating, so laced with self-disgust, that I don’t trust myself to articulate them. By the time we’re back in the car, I’ve almost started to hate him, his good manners feeling like a benign dictatorship. He turns to me before he starts the engine.
“Olivia—”
“Livvy,” I correct him.
He pauses, his hands holding the bottom of the steering wheel.
“I wanted to say . . .” he starts, hesitant, “I’ve very much enjoyed spending this time with you, despite the context.”
“You don’t have to do this—”
“Please let me finish,” he says. “So perhaps you’d let me take you for supper?”
I look at him, utterly thrown.
“Yes, I mean, I suppose so.”
We’re like two people doing a dance without having learned the steps. Or maybe it’s just me who doesn’t know the steps.
“I’d like that.” He smiles a real smile that makes my heart soften and mulch. I shouldn’t be here, and yet I’ve somehow lost the strength to pry myself away. “Ready?” he says, turning over the rumbly engine.
It all feels so abrupt all of a sudden. I grip the foam of the seat, my fingers digging in.
“Do you mind . . . I just need to go back to the barn for a second.”
I step out quickly, too fast perhaps for him to stop me, gulping in the clean country air, so different from the closeness of the car. I feel that light-headed sensation as I open the door, suddenly conscious how similar it is to the way I used to feel when Sally would push me too far, force me to look over the edge of the precipice.
It’s almost a shock to find everything piled up as I left it. The sense of her is so acute, so vivid: I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d found some wrinkle in time and space and come back to remind me who’s boss. I wish you had, I think, a lump in my throat at the inconvertible evidence that she’s not coming back. The half-empty boxes and stacks of clothes form a strange kind of imprint of yesterday. So much has changed since I last stood here, or perhaps it hasn’t—perhaps it’s only changed for me.
Something draws me back to that scarlet coat. I pull it out, hanging it on the outside of the box where I can contemplate it. I never wore color until I knew Sally—it was her who taught me how much a vivid shade could infuse your state of mind and change the way the world reacted to you. I hold the tips of the sleeves outward, almost like we’re holding hands, my eyes brimming with tears. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “Please don’t hate me.”
It takes a supreme effort for me to collect myself: twice I get as far as the door and have to stop and simply breathe. The coat hangs there like an exclamation mark—before I leave I push it deep into the box it came from.
William’s staring straight ahead into the middle distance as I slide into the car.
“I’m sorry, I just needed to—”
He cuts across me.
“I called National Rail Inquiries. There’s a train leaving Branksome in thirty-five minutes, so I’ll need to put my foot down.”
My head swivels toward him, but his gaze is still firmly planted on the drive, his jaw clenched shut to stop anything untoward from escaping.
“I’m ready.”