I Saw a Man (30 page)

Beyond his writing, Michael’s life was beginning to move on in other areas, too. He’d begun going for drinks with a group of other fencers after club nights in Highgate. There was a woman among them about whom Samantha often teased him. A divorcée in her early thirties who’d already made it known among her friends that if Michael was interested, she’d love to see more of him. Michael took Samantha’s teasing and probing in good nature, but her comments were an effective sounding of his emotional state. The thought of what she suggested in her jokes still felt impossible to him. Caroline was too present, and perhaps, he sometimes wondered, always would be.

“I suppose,” Samantha had said one night in the pub, as they’d waited for Rachel to finish at her drama group, “you lost her early, didn’t you?”

“Early?” Michael said, although he already knew what she meant.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Samantha said, playing with her half-eaten salad. “I mean before you had a chance to ever feel bored with each other. Or pissed off.”

“Maybe,” Michael said.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” She leant forward and laid a hand on his arm. “None of my business. It’s just…”

“No, no,” Michael reassured her. “You’re probably right. It was all just starting, really.”

Samantha sat back in her chair. “It’s what she’d have wanted, you know. Eventually.”

“What? For me to start sleeping with other women?” Michael couldn’t keep the distaste from his voice.

“Yes,” Samantha said. “Or, at least, to have someone. To not be on your own. Unless, of course, that’s what makes you happy. Being on your own.” She smiled and reached forward to give his arm a squeeze again. “But you mustn’t be afraid of it, Michael. Or feel guilty.”

They’d had that conversation more than a month ago, but nothing had changed since, and Michael was yet to make any attempt to find that person, or even begin a journey towards them. But he knew Samantha was right. Caroline would have wanted him to be with someone else. If he was honest, it was possible this might even have been true if she’d lived. He’d often wondered, if never aloud, for how long they’d have been together. He’d hoped forever, of course, but he’d never known for certain. Not for sure. Caroline had found solidity in him, in their marriage. She’d found a peace. But she wasn’t naturally of an exclusive nature, and had always been more multiple than singular of character.

Despite his reluctance to enter another relationship, Michael still missed women physically. Recently, late at night after a day’s work, he’d found himself typing “Hampstead + Escorts” into his search engine more than once, browsing the posed thumbnails of “Erika,” “Giselle,” and “Cindy,” the lists of their services and rates in bold below each of them. But his desire had never taken him as far as the contact email or phone number, and although he’d told himself that hiring one of these girls would be preferable to risking the feelings of a longer-term partner, he’d always ended up closing his laptop and walking away from his desk.

Instinctively, Michael felt that if he were ever to start again with another woman, then it would have to happen elsewhere, beyond London. Already, despite his resolve to be governed by the lives of Samantha and Rachel, the prospect of a move was increasingly seductive. Once the new book was done. Once he knew Samantha and Rachel were further along their recovery. The thought of it, when he allowed it to, excited him. He was grateful to Peter for his flat, but it had always been intended as a holding pattern. And soon, he could feel it, he’d be ready to leave. The guilt, the pain of what had happened here, he would always own. But a move, he knew, would alter the texture of that pain, the nature of its ache. Perhaps to somewhere on the continent, or back to New York. There was something about the fabric of the city that would suit his situation. Its streets, breathing with single lives, were fed by their hungers. Once there, having changed the geography of his living, then Michael could imagine perhaps finding someone: a woman from elsewhere who, having altered her own landscape, might be ready to accept someone like him with whom to share it.

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE GALLERY WAS
crowded, so Michael saw Josh only when he’d already been at Samantha’s private view for more than an hour. He was standing in a far corner, talking animatedly to a younger couple, occasionally pointing at the framed print beside them. He was tanned and had lost weight, but still looked much older than when Michael had last seen him at close quarters. The grey that had always seeded his hair had spread, and his face was more lined than Michael remembered. The collar of his shirt was worn on one side, its sleeves rolled. His forearms, Michael noticed, were crosshatched with cuts and scratches.

―

The gallery was owned by a friend of Sebastian’s, the director for whom Samantha worked as a PA. It was a small, two-roomed space on a mostly residential street beyond Flask Walk. Originally a florist’s, it now housed four or five temporary exhibitions a year. It was Michael who’d persuaded Samantha to show her employer some of her prints, but Sebastian who’d done the rest. A week later the gallery owner, Emmanuel, had written to her. Could he exhibit Samantha’s work? Only for a couple of weeks at first, but if it sold, then maybe longer.

With the arrival of Emmanuel’s email, Samantha’s previous confidence in her work evaporated. She told Michael it was too soon, that she still had over a year to go with her MA. That the work wasn’t good enough.

“What happened to the only-half-cooked idea?” Michael asked her.

“Very funny,” she’d said, a spread of her prints covering the dining table. Their family portrait still hung above it, and as she slid the photographs over one another her younger self looked over her shoulder, Lucy on her knee, Rachel sitting on Josh’s lap beside her.

“Seriously, though,” she’d said, running a hand through her hair. “How am I meant to choose? He said he could hang twenty-five at most. Maybe thirty at a push.”

She’d been taking her pond photos for over eight months by then. Over 240 images, all from the same position, at the same time of day.

Michael, who’d been leaning against the kitchen island, came to sit opposite her. “I’ll help,” he said, spreading the prints and turning them round so he could see them.

“Really?” she said. “God, that would be amazing.”

“I wouldn’t get too excited,” Michael said. “I’m no expert.”

“Yes, you are,” she countered, as Michael placed a winter scene next to a morning in March. “It’s meant to be what you’re good at, isn’t it? Finding the story?”

Since that evening, Michael had assisted Samantha with other elements of the exhibition, too. Bringing the framed prints back to her house, choosing their positions in the gallery, suggesting a title for the show:
And Again.
Earlier that evening, forgoing his fencing-club night, he’d shared a cab over to the gallery with her and Rachel, its floor filled with boxes of wine, glasses, and fruit juice. Samantha had been quiet on the journey, her nerves drying up her talk. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” Rachel had said as they’d driven up alongside the Heath, the boxed glasses chattering at their feet. “They’ll like you, I know they will.”

―

Moving away from the drinks table where he’d been serving, Michael began edging through the crowd towards Josh. He’d barely seen him since the night they’d spoken over the hedge. After moving out, Josh had remained on the periphery of Samantha and Rachel’s lives. He saw his daughter regularly, and he kept in touch with Samantha. But it was one of Michael’s most persistent regrets that Josh had chosen to keep him at a greater distance. Twice now, Michael had seen him on the Heath as he’d walked back from his fencing lesson. Too far away to call, but close enough to make each other out. Neither time had Josh made any attempt to approach him. And somehow Michael had known Josh hadn’t wanted him to go towards him, either. So he’d walked on instead, along his usual route, aware of Josh’s eyes following him.

Samantha, when Michael asked her, couldn’t say why Josh had retreated from him. “Who knows?” she’d said, when he pressed her on it one night. “It’s his way, I guess, of coping.” She was stacking plates into a cupboard, reaching on tiptoe to complete the pile. “But it isn’t just you, you know? He’s become more solitary in general. He hardly ever sees anyone.” She turned round to rest against the counter. “I don’t know,” she said and sighed. “He’ll come round. He just needs time, I suppose.” She picked up another stack of plates. “We all do.”

If Samantha had surprised Michael with the keeping of her promises, with her growth after Lucy’s death, then she, in turn, had been wrong-footed by Josh’s reaction to losing his job. At first, he’d done nothing; rarely leaving his flat as if he’d given himself completely to inertia. The only times Samantha had seen him was when he’d come to take Rachel for the day. Michael would occasionally glimpse him coming up the street for these appointments, unshaven, wearing tracksuit bottoms or creased jeans, like the forgotten father of the man Michael had first met when he’d moved in. Samantha became worried about his state of mind. She began to wonder if she should let Rachel go with him alone.

But then, within a few weeks, he’d changed. He’d asked to meet Samantha for a coffee. When they did, he’d told her he’d decided not to reenter banking for a while, but to take a break and do something different. “The whole thing’s going downhill fast, anyway,” he’d said. “And it’s only going to carry on, too, before it ever picks up. There’s enough money, for a while, at least. So don’t worry, nothing will change on that front. But, yeah, I thought I’d stay out of it for a bit. Get some space.” He’d looked down at his cup, then spread his hands, palms up. “I just wanted you to know,” he’d said, as if admitting a new relationship.

Before they left the café, he’d asked Samantha not to file for a divorce. The subject had crossed her mind, but only in the abstract. It was all too soon. She was still processing so much of what had happened. She was still grieving. “Of course not, Josh,” she’d said. “What makes you think I would?”

“I don’t know. Moving out. Everything that’s…”

She’d taken his hand. “You know what we said. Let’s give it time. All of it.”

He’d looked her in the eye, and she’d seen he was scared. Either of what she might do or of what he might say. “Just get yourself together,” she’d said, squeezing his fingers. “For Rachel, at least.”

Josh had seen the advert in the local newsagents, between the rooms for rent and the mother and baby yoga sessions. Three mornings a week, volunteering with a National Trust gardener at two of their properties in Hampstead: Number Two Willow Road, a 1930s modernist home, and Fenton House, a seventeenth-century merchant’s house crowning the hill above Hampstead Village.

For a couple of months, as autumn gave way to winter, those three mornings came to define Josh’s weeks. Clearing bamboo, weeds, and rubble at Willow Road, or pruning the apple trees, their branches furred with frost, at Fenton House. He was unskilled but took to the work well. His mind, he realised, had been looking for this: hours outdoors in which it could wander beyond the repetition of his jobs. Nathan, the National Trust gardener, was a quiet man and was content, once he knew Josh could be trusted, to set him going, then leave him alone. The other volunteers tended to come and go frequently. They were actors between jobs, gap-year students, or just people fulfilling the hours demanded by another organisation—the Duke of Edinburgh Award, community service. Once these were completed, Nathan never saw them again. But Josh proved to be constant, a regular. Often, on finishing a shift he’d stay on, especially in Fenton House, sitting on one of the benches in the walled garden, breathing in the iron scent of freshly turned soil, or listening to the birdsong. Which was why, when Josh applied for a vacancy with one of the conservation teams on the Heath, Nathan had supported him so enthusiastically. Because in all his years of gardening, never before had he met a man who so clearly needed to feel the earth again, in whom the exertion of physical work had so plainly brought peace, and with it, pleasure.

“I know, ironic, isn’t it?” Samantha had said when she’d told Michael. They’d been in her garden, weeding and dividing clumps of perennials. “He’s working for the City again. It’s like he can’t bloody escape them.”

“The City?” Michael said. “How do you mean?”

“Well, they own it, don’t they?” Samantha cleared a strand of hair from her face and sat back on her heels. “The Heath,” she’d said, wiping her forehead with the top of her wrist. “Or at least the Corporation of London does, which in my book is pretty much the same thing.” She threw a handful of weeds onto the pile between them. “So, yeah,” she’d said, returning to her work. “He’s on the payroll again.”

For a moment neither of them had spoken. There was just the tearing sound of the weeds being uprooted, the barking of dogs from the Heath.

“But it’s working for him,” Samantha had said after a while. Michael’s mind had drifted and at first he didn’t know what she was talking about. He’d looked over at her, but she was focused on her work, pulling at the weeds with short, steady tugs. “I even think it makes him happy,” she said, throwing another clump onto the pile.

―

As Michael parted the bodies in the gallery before him, gently touching backs and shoulders as he pressed forward, Josh, looking up from his conversation, saw him approaching. Michael managed to free a hand and raise it, nodding over the expansive hair of a blonde woman between them. Josh didn’t acknowledge the greeting, but just looked back at him, a disturbance in his eyes. His expression stopped Michael in the middle of the crowd. Not because it had been so unexpected, but because it was a look of such long-held animosity, not a sudden aversion. A look of knowledge, not question.

Michael was about to continue towards him when a whine of feedback punctuated Emmanuel’s stepping up to a microphone to ask the crowd for quiet. The heads around Michael all turned in the direction of his amplified voice. As Michael did the same, he glanced over at Josh again. He, too, was looking towards the microphone now. He looked calm, smiling at Emmanuel’s opening jokes. So perhaps Michael had been wrong. Perhaps his guilt was making him see things and fear things that weren’t to be seen or to be feared. He took a drink from his glass and, as Samantha stepped up to speak, tried to focus on what she had to say.