Golden Hour (23 page)

“Even so.” Roddy is prepared for Diana's resistance, and has determined to press on regardless. As the great day approaches he feels increasingly reckless. To Diana's self-absorbed incomprehension he opposes a stubborn will. “I could go on to the Broads for Friday night, and meet up with you for Saturday lunch.”

“Laura won't want you on Friday night. You'll just be in the way.”

“All I need is a bed.”

Max appears, silent and bleary-eyed. Not usually up so early.

“If you become a Catholic I'll divorce you,” says Diana.

“Why?” says Roddy.

“Why?” The question surprises Diana. “Because converts are
sad needy people whose lives aren't working out. How would I explain it to my friends?”

Roddy stares at her without answering. Right now she seems to him to be a thousand miles away.

“So I'll get a train down to Sussex after work on Friday,” he says.

“Well, if that's what you really want. There's coffee left in the pot, Max, but it won't pour itself. I'd better get myself ready, I have a meeting at nine.”

So it's agreed: Roddy will spend Friday night with the Broads. He knows that Diana has given in because it's a matter of no importance to her. She is quite unable to imagine what Roddy has in mind for the weekend, which makes things easier for him, but is also hurtful to his pride. If he were to take up an eight-inch knife and stab her a hundred times, she would look on him in a different way. He has no desire to stab his wife, but he can't deny to himself that he looks forward to the expression on her face when he tells her just how radically things are going to change. She won't believe him at first. Then she'll ask Laura, and Laura will nod and say yes, it really is happening. Then Diana will believe him. He imagines her in shock. How will she explain it to her friends?

Diana leaves the house in a hurry, on her way to her first meeting of the day. She works as a fund-raiser, one of many, for the Royal Opera House, a function she describes at dinner parties as “chiseling.” Roddy decides to wait a little, so that he can have his walk to the underground station to himself. He needs to call Laura, to ask about Friday night.

Max has started to read the paper in an inattentive sort of way.

“You know we're away this weekend,” Roddy says.

“Cool,” says Max, not looking up.

“Are you likely to be around?”

“No idea.”

“All I ask is that you don't drink the Barolo. That's expensive wine.”

Max says nothing to this.

“I wonder what you'd say, Max,” says Roddy, “if I disappeared?”

Max looks up, blinking.

“I sometimes think you wouldn't notice if I was here or not.”

Max looks even more baffled.

“But you are here.”

“Yes, okay. Don't worry about it. I'll head off.”

He's actually in the hall, looking round for his phone, when Max appears, a frown wrinkling his brow.

“Dad?”

“Yes, Max?”

“You know your shed?”

“Yes, Max.”

“Some time, when you've got the time, I'd like to know what it is you read.”

Roddy is caught off-guard. This is the first time that Max has shown any curiosity about him of any kind. What's more, for all his early-morning blinking and shuffling, he says it in a way that suggests he means it.

“What I read,” says Roddy, playing for time, unsure how to respond. “I don't think it's your kind of thing.”

“I know Mum laughs about it,” says Max. “But I'm not Mum.”

“Diana is very tolerant,” says Roddy. “I appreciate very much that she gives me my own space.”

Max looks at his father with his head a little to one side, as if asking himself whether or not to believe what he's just heard.

“Apparently you're looking for God,” he says.

“Am I? Yes, I suppose I am.” Roddy feels compelled by his
son's unexpectedly direct gaze to speak the simple truth. “I'm looking for the right way to live.”

Max nods a couple of times, then smiles. He is a very good-looking young man, and when he smiles Roddy feels honored. He gets his good looks from Diana, of course.

“Okay,” says Max. “Cool. Let's talk sometime.”

Roddy leaves the house a little dazed. All his plans are based on the assumption that he is of no significance in his own home. This late flush of interest in him by his son presents a complication. But there's no turning back now. He's been preparing for this for too long.

Out on the street he stands by the canal and calls the Broads on his mobile phone. He prays that Laura will pick up, not Henry or Carrie. His prayer is answered.

“Laura, it's Roddy. I wonder if you could do me a favor? I have to come down to Sussex on Friday evening. I'm going to Worth Abbey. Would it be possible for me to have a bed for Friday night?”

“Yes, of course, Roddy. Just you?”

Her voice so warm and welcoming.

“Just me.”

“What time will you show up? Will you need feeding?”

“No, I'll be late. No later than ten.”

“What are you up to at Worth Abbey, Roddy?”

When Laura asks, it's not at all like Diana. You can tell from her voice that she's curious in a good way.

“It's all about silence, really.”

“Silence? God, that would be wonderful. And scary.”

“And both at once, maybe.”

“You're really going on adventures, aren't you, Roddy? I almost envy you.”

“You can have adventures too, Laura.”

“You think so? First I have a Buckingham Palace garden party, then I have a dinner party. Adventure has to wait its turn.”

“It's there whenever you want it. All you have to be is a leaf on the wind.”

“A leaf on the wind?”

“Go where life takes you.”

“Well, you can tell me all about it over the weekend.”

“I will,” says Roddy. “I'd love to have a quiet moment to talk, just you and me.”

“Me too. See you Friday night.”

This short conversation exhilarates Roddy. He walks briskly up the canal, across Colebrook Row, and up Duncan Street, his mind filled with Laura. She has never made it so plain before that she too wants her life to change. She too is a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth.

Descending the escalator at the Angel, reputed to be the longest escalator in London, Roddy feels as if he has already gone into the silence. For all the hustling streams of people heading to work on every side, he is magnificently alone. The escalator is the stream of life, carrying him to his destiny. All he has to do is not resist.

It's a relief to Maggie to be out of the office and on the road. Sam's jokey insistence that she can solve all her problems by marrying him has stopped being funny, but she can't say so without revealing that she's more disturbed than she wants to admit. Also she's putting off the moment when she writes her formal letter of apology to Murray. In fact she's putting off her entire life, keeping all her thoughts of the future in a state of suspension, until she can make the decision about Andrew.

Memories of Andrew haunt her. She recalls the first time they spent the whole night together, waking to find her wrist lightly covered by his sleeping hand, and how happy this made her. Her previous boyfriend, known to her friends as “nasty Nigel,” always rolled away from her in the bed, actively repelling her affectionate touch, saying it stopped him from sleeping. He chose whenever possible to have sex somewhere other than a bedroom, on the couch while watching television was a favorite, which was exciting; but later he would announce he needed to go back to his place to sleep, and she was left feeling lonely in the night. With Andrew everything was the other way round. There were times when she wished he would go back to his place.

She remembers then—she's turned off the main road now, she's driving down one of the lanes where if you meet another
car one of you has to back to a passing place—she remembers that she made him go home on Sunday evening, instead of taking the early train on Monday morning, as is his usual pattern. She tries to regain the feeling she had then, of being crowded by him, of wanting her own space, but it won't come. It seems to her that having Andrew around all the time is comforting, supportive, the way things should be.

I'm a hopeless case. I want him to stay when he's not there, and want to go when he is.

An Audi TT convertible comes fast toward her and brakes hard. Both of them check the hedges to see if there's room to creep past each other. The TT driver, a middle-aged man wearing a baseball cap, has an impatient look on his face, but when they make eye contact this vanishes. He smiles, gives her a wave, and reverses with speed and skill. He pulls into a driveway, and Maggie goes by, with a smile and wave of her own in acknowledgment. His eyes on her all the way. Not her type at all, but nice to see that he finds her worth looking at.

As she has done again and again over the last three days, she finds herself asking: is there anyone better out there? Jo had it exactly. Is Andrew the last in line? Of course there'll be men like the TT driver who are willing to give her a good long stare, but she's talking about reliable, kind men, who are at the same time a little exciting, even a little dangerous.

I'd know him if I met him. But how long will that take?

She bumps her little Nissan Micra over the level crossing and turns down the lane to Hamsey. The sign by the side of the road says Ivors Lane. There was some kind of fuss about that, years before she took on her present job, some objections to the choice of name. Ivor was a local who had died in an accident, or perhaps a suicide?

Ahead at the far end of the lane rises the knoll on which
Hamsey Church stands, its stubby square tower watching over the river valley as it has done for almost a thousand years.

Would I know him if I saw him?
Him
, the one who is not too nasty, not too nice, in whose presence all my doubts will vanish. But what if it doesn't work that way? What if the key to contentment with a partner lies not in the character of the partner at all, but in the making of an act of will? Maybe anyone would do. Maybe I'm the problem, expecting the decision to be made for me by some outside force. By love.

Is it so wrong to want to fall in love?

She sees her destination before her, just as predicted by the site plan attached to the planning application. Wayland Farm is a collection of three buildings set round a yard screened by poplars. The main house retains its original sixteenth-century hall-house layout, with an extension at the back added in the early nineteenth century. Before it, enclosing a yard that would once have been hammered chalk and is now pea shingle, a timber barn faces a brick cart lodge. The ensemble of buildings is modest, vernacular, in its way perfect.

She pulls up in the yard and takes out her file, to refresh her memory of the application. Wayland Farm is Grade II listed. The application is for a conversion, the cart lodge is to have its open bays walled in, and to have windows cut in its existing rear and side elevations, to create a workroom.

Even before she's got out of the car Maggie knows this is out of the question. The cart lodge is an oak-framed building that has retained the beam-and-brace structure, with its front posts raised on brick bases. The three open bays beneath the tiled roof have sunk and twisted over the years, but they retain a simple harmony, a delight in right proportion, that in its own domestic fashion honors the landscape as faithfully as the nearby Norman church. The cart lodge is a jewel.

She sighs to herself as she gets out of the car. This will not be easy.

Her knock at the door produces no response. She checks her watch: she's on time, even a little late. She knocks again. Then she peers through the windows. There seems to be no one in. She takes out her phone and rings the owner's number. No answer.

She turns away, frowning. Having come this far, she might as well make her inspection. So she unfolds the plans for the proposed conversion and goes over to the cart lodge. She's still standing in the yard when a voice speaks from behind her.

“Can I help?”

She swings round, and sees a tall man of forty or so, wearing jeans and a light cotton jacket, with shaggy blondish hair and boyish features. But the way he's looking at her is not boyish at all. There's a sweet sadness in his face, and though his eyes are on her, he's not taking her in. His concerns are elsewhere.

“I'm Maggie Dutton,” she says, putting out a hand. “Conservation Officer with the Planning Department. We had an appointment for ten this morning?”

“Did we? I had no idea.”

He looks round, clearly not sure what he's supposed to do.

“Are you Mr. Strachan?”

“Yes, I suppose I am. I wish I'd known you were coming.”

“It's not a problem. All I have to do is make a site visit, so I can write up my report. I'm almost done, actually.”

“Right. Is there anything I can do for you? I don't really know how this sort of thing goes.”

Maggie watches him in his confusion, and she experiences a matching confusion of her own. To her dismay, the moment she saw him she felt a click of recognition, despite the fact that he is a total stranger to her.

This is the kind of man I could love.

Of course it's utterly ridiculous. How can you know such a thing at a glance? And yet people do, or they say they do. Some sort of instinctual knowledge that operates at a level far deeper than the rational. And though she struggles against it, or tells herself she must struggle against it, she's doing everything in her power to attract him. She's doing that tipping-her-head-down thing, where you look up at him. She's stroking her arm with her free hand. She's making her voice soft. All this without a single conscious decision on her part.

“I just have to take some photographs,” she says. “Then I'll be done.”