I Saw a Man (5 page)

When Michael woke the next morning it had been as simple as a single thought repeating in his mind, a voice belonging to both his past and his future self. “I don’t want this to stop.” But with it came a fear he hadn’t experienced so purely since childhood. It was the trepidation of happiness, a spreading sensation in his chest provoked by a joy so palpable that by its very nature it was unbearably fragile, too—beaten thin in its expansion, ephemeral before the certainties of life, death.

As Caroline showered, she, too, became aware of a shift in her perception. In previous relationships her single life had been a whispering promise she’d had to keep at bay. But now that whisper had faded to silence, and she realised where once she’d only ever wanted herself, now she wanted Michael too. As she’d lain on top of him the previous night, both of them breathing like sprinters, distant cars sounding over the bridge, she’d felt a subtle conception somewhere deep within her. Not of a child, but of what, if she allowed it, could happen next. Because this was no longer about sex or feeling wanted or new experience. And this is what she told Michael over their breakfast that morning. That it wasn’t about infatuation or abating loneliness. It was about something else now, but whatever it was, she could speak of it only in terms of what it wasn’t because she’d never felt it before. But, she said, pouring them coffee and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, what she did know was that she wanted more of it. Whatever it was, she wanted more.

―

The following spring they watched, Michael’s arm across Caroline’s shoulders, as the removal company’s lorry manoeuvred its way down the lane towards Coed y Bryn. As it lumbered towards them, rocking in the potholes, broken stalks of cow parsley shivered in its wing mirrors, as if it had been decorated expressly for this, its arrival at their marital home.

For the first week they went nowhere other than the local shops or takeaways. As they opened each packing crate and box, the objects of their previous lives began to fill the low-beamed rooms of Coed y Bryn. Lamps from New York, rugs from Kabul, a set of chairs from Berlin. Caroline, Michael discovered, owned two guitars, neither of which she could play. He, meanwhile, to appease her pleading, agreed to try on his student fencing kit she’d found, gutting it with glee from a musty kitbag. The creases in the jacket were stiff with age, but it still fit him, as did the breeches, streaked with long rust stains from the blades they’d been wrapped around. Pulling on the equally rust-patched mask, Caroline had picked up one of his épées, its coquille dented and scratched, and come at him with it, slashing at his arms, crying, “Defend yourself! Defend yourself!”

In the afternoons, despite her inexperience, Caroline attacked the garden with equal enthusiasm, working quickly and haphazardly. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she didn’t care. She wanted, she told Michael, to feel this turn in their lives between her fingers, in the soil of their new home, in its moisture seeping through her jeans as she knelt at the bramble-choked shrubs and bushes.

While the shadows of the May evenings lengthened over Caroline in the garden, a haze of midges blurring the air above her, Michael continued working inside, unpacking and arranging the furniture of their single lives. At night, whether it was cold or not, they lit the wood stove, opened a bottle of wine, and fitted themselves into a single armchair to talk about their future and watch the hills through the window turn inky against a darkening sky.

But already, even in those first months, Michael could sense the cottage alone might not be enough for Caroline. Their rhythms were complementary but different, and the move to Coed y Bryn had revealed this in a way their London lives had not. Both he and Caroline were storytellers, not of their own lives but of others’. It was this vocational territory, of exploring and shaping beyond themselves, that they’d first shared. It was what had first brought them together. But where Michael always retreated to his desk to tell his stories, Caroline had simply moved on to the next. For her their telling was a need, a hunger. Her belief in the truth being told was almost fanatical, whatever the outcome of a story’s exposure. Where Michael would carefully weigh his content for repercussion or hurt, Caroline had always been fearless with consequence.

“Why wouldn’t you be?” she’d once challenged him. “Anything that happens is only what should have happened anyway, if it was known in the first place. And what’s the alternative?” she’d asked him, warming to her theme. “The untold story,” she’d said, pointing at him like an accuser. “It’s like landfill. We can bury it all we like, but in time it’ll catch up with us.”

Her passion was infectious and Caroline’s commitment to her craft had been one of the traits Michael had most admired about her when they’d first met. But he also knew it wasn’t without self-interest. For him the life of his subject was another country, one he discovered first in person, and then again on the page. Once back at his desk his stories travelled further than he had, went where he’d been unable to go, leaving Michael behind as a silent still point, a governing hand from afar. But for Caroline the stories of others were her fuel. She travelled for them and through them. Their birthing into the light was her nutrition, their telling what kept her moving.

“We can be still here.” This is what she’d said to him when they’d first viewed Coed y Bryn and the estate agent had left them alone to talk. Michael had wanted to believe her, and as they’d bedded in over that spring, he’d continued to do so. But sometimes, when they walked to the top of the hill behind the cottage, or when he found her looking out of its windows on the landing, he’d catch a flicker in her expression, as if it wasn’t freedom she saw in those hills, fields, and woods, but constriction.

On that first night they’d met at the Frontline, Caroline’s manner had reminded Michael of a birdcage, her small body alive with wings brushing against her wire. On moving to Coed y Bryn he’d sensed those birds begin to settle, their wings fold, their alert heads become calm. But they were still there, inside her. Their lightness, their potential for flight. And this is what Michael saw in those moments on the hill, or on the landing, when something surfaced, briefly, beneath her features. The wingtip of one of those birds woken within her, its plumage flashing in her eye, its feathers brushing under her brow.

―

Within days of unpacking, Michael had begun work on his next book. Like
BrotherHoods, The Man Who Broke the Mirror
was to be a work of nonfiction, but novelistic in style and tone. Its subject was Oliver Blackwood, a brilliant but volatile neurosurgeon who in recent years had controversially, and often on the back of the work of others, “crossed the floor” to stray into matters of neuroscience. Although trained in the biological workings of the material brain, for the last decade Oliver had been making waves, and trouble, with his writings and lectures on abstract matters of the mind. Not that Oliver himself saw such a clear distinction between the two. “The material,” he’d told Michael early on in his research. “It’s all we’ve got, all we are. Anything else—memory, emotion,” he’d tapped his finger roughly against Michael’s head. “It’s all created, for real or as illusion, by this, the spongy stuff inside our skulls.”

At the time Michael met him, Oliver, with the determination of a Victorian explorer, had become fixated upon locating the neurological source of empathy. It was an emotion, he believed, born in “mirror” neurons, single cells in the human brain through which the actions and feelings of others are mirrored and therefore felt. “I’m telling you,” he’d once told Michael before taking the stage for a panel discussion, “mirror neurons. They’re the future. You watch, they’ll do for neuroscience what DNA did for biology. Think about it, it’s the source of everything. Everything!”

The book’s title referred to Oliver’s theory, but also to his capacity for self-destruction. Even without his ideas about neuroscience he would have made an arresting character study. An intellectual and a performer, imbued with the traditional arrogance of his craft, he was a man equally cast in temper and reason. But it was how the nature of his research sat within Oliver’s own life that had convinced Michael that Oliver would be the subject of his next book. Oliver, as far as he could tell, was a man driven by an unacknowledged desire to fathom his own failings. To discover the neurological manifestation of the very emotion he himself most appeared to lack. It was this, beyond the colour of Oliver’s life, Michael hoped his second book would be about. An intimate portrait of a search for why we feel for others, often beyond ourselves, conducted by a man whose default position was only ever to think of himself.

For the past two years Michael had accompanied Oliver to conferences, lectures, broadcasting studios, seminars, and operating theatres. Over the course of their time together, as other colleagues had fallen away, his presence in Oliver’s life had grown to occupy the spaces they’d left. In time he became the kind of witness men like Oliver needed. At first Oliver had merely tolerated Michael’s presence. But then he’d begun to court it. For the last year of Michael’s research, he’d come to rely on it. Oliver was an actor for whom the public world of popular neuroscience had become a stage, his many critics and detractors an audience. But when they were no longer on hand, or had tired of his antics, it was Michael who’d remained; a dedicated audience of one, there to sit and watch Oliver’s late-night rants in his London club, or to answer the phone in the morning and listen to his latest theories.

Michael and Caroline’s leaving London coincided with Michael’s leaving of Oliver. He’d reached that point in his process when he must turn away from the man himself, to the man he’d render on the page. The arc of the book, Michael felt, was complete. Oliver had written it almost perfectly, plotting over the last year a course in his private life in exact inverse trajectory to the ascendency of his public one. In this respect Michael’s sense of a story had come good. During his time with Oliver he’d watched as the character traits he’d detected when they’d first met became inflated with attention to cause havoc with his marriage, his children, and the many colleagues who would no longer talk to him. At the same time, however, and with perfect symmetry as far as Michael was concerned, just as Oliver was being ostracised by his family and friends, so his ideas on mirror neurons and empathy were being accepted by the scientific community.

Michael set up his study in one of the cottage’s upper rooms at Coed y Bryn, a simple table in front of a window through which, on a clear day, he could see the Severn glinting on the horizon. Although he still fielded calls from Oliver, and had agreed to meet him once when he’d come west to deliver a lecture in Bath, Michael knew he needed to withdraw into the necessary hibernation of his writing. After two years of fitting his life to Oliver’s hectic schedule, he wanted to slow and still his days so he could both immerse himself in, and take himself out, of his story.

As Michael worked on his book upstairs, Caroline began a new job in Bristol. Before they’d left London she’d applied for a producer’s position at Sightline Productions, a TV company specialising in news and investigative documentary. The directors of the company had been thrilled to welcome someone of Caroline’s experience. Although she’d fallen short of becoming a household name with the satellite channel, she’d garnered a growing respect within the industry. There was personality to her reports and by the age of thirty she’d already broken two international stories herself.

Twice a week, when Caroline travelled into the Sightline offices to attend forward planning and development meetings, Michael was woken by the gruff engine of their faded red Volvo filtering into his sleep. Ten hours later her return was heralded by its headlights sweeping the hedges. For the rest of the week Caroline worked at home, editing scripts, making calls, and viewing cuts downstairs on the kitchen table.

The majority of Sightline’s work dealt with issues in the South West. Half-hour investigations following the local news: slave labour among immigrant work gangs, care home abuses in Bath, the environmental battles over the Severn Estuary barrage. Occasionally a local story would provoke national interest: a study by Bristol University into pesticides and the declining bee population, the story of a Devon family’s fight for their father’s right to die. When it did, it was Caroline’s job to work with the development team and chase the larger budgets of a network commission.

None of it satisfied her, and Michael knew it. The few times Sightline asked her to oversee a shoot, or whenever she set one up herself, Michael could sense the change in her as soon as she came through the door, her shoulders slung with cameras and bags of tape. It would stay with her through the night, as they ate, read by the fire, or watched TV. He would feel it emanating off her as she nestled into him. Even in bed, it felt at times as if their lovemaking was vitalised by her having tasted her old reporting life again.

When Michael asked her about it, she’d reassured him that this was what she’d wanted. It was she who’d suggested they move out of London. And she who’d said she had to put a stop to her travelling, to change her life from peripatetic to rooted. It would be fine, she told him. She just needed to get used to the different pressure points, the new rhythms of their lives. The foreign fieldwork, she’d explained to him one morning in bed, it had been like a drug. That was all. But she was coming off it now. For them, but mostly for herself.

―

Their first winter at Coed y Bryn was long, arriving with a sudden October frost furring the fields and icing the trees, before dragging on through to snow flurries in April. Despite the weather, or perhaps because of it, it was over these months that Caroline took to climbing the hill behind the cottage on her own. There was no mobile reception inside the house and Michael noticed she’d begun taking her phone with her on these walks. It hadn’t worried him. He’d sensed no waning in her feelings for him. If anything, their relationship, still young, was only strengthening. Their life was finding its pattern, both mutual and independent. Ever since he was a teenager Michael had lived with a low-grade hum of concern that he would never be able to love. Not fully, beyond the initial attraction. Not with all of his past and all of his future as well as his present. But with every day together at Coed y Bryn, Caroline was proving him wrong.