Infidelities (2 page)

Certainly what she was aware of at the time was the way that day, that morning, each detail around the monk – the dark stones and brickwork of the village building, the gilt detail around the face of the clock, the fresh blue china colour of the summer sky, early and fresh and really like polished china because there’d been rain last night – seemed to charge itself, Helen thinks now that’s exactly it, the phrase, ‘charge itself’, each detail lending her its full and significant meaning. And set against these things,
these
things
, the
thingness
, if you like, of building stones and of sky, was the vivid colour of saffron robes, the little earthen bowl, pale straw of the sitting mat … These elements of the monk that seemed on another plane altogether, ethereal, even though they were right there in front of her, come out of a place way beyond herself, unknown to her entirely, of hope or faith or dream.

Something started for her then. She had the strong instinct which of course she immediately quelled to put her hands together to form her hands into a prayer position like the monk was doing, to extend herself towards him that way … But she hadn’t done that, not anything crazed or needy. Instead, she’d managed, after all the initial feelings of belief and disbelief and of wonder, to be exactly as Elizabeth had suggested. She’d approached the monk, gently put a few coins and a crumpled note into the begging bowl at the corner of the mat, and said, slowly but in a very safe, English way, ‘Welcome.’

The man looked into her eyes. He didn’t speak.

That ‘welcome’ must have sounded strange yet Helen hadn’t felt foolish about it, or even embarrassed – really it was as though she’d entered a kind of dream. Everything was quiet, set. There was a stillness in the air, around the monk, that Helen was part of – as though the stillness had entered her, was part of her. A feeling Helen recognises now in a way she couldn’t then as calm. It was only when Margaret Cockburn from three doors down arrived, and came up to the monk and said ‘Welcome’ pretty much in the same way Helen had, that it was as if she remembered,
with a start, the twins back home on their own, and she rushed away, arriving at the house with her heart like a roaring engine as she tore up the stairs, three at a time. There were the boys though, just as she’d left them, quiet and placid and only starting to move when she leaned over them and startled them with her noisy, ragged breath. She stayed there some time, standing over them, watching them, listening to the small sucking noises they made as they opened and closed their mouths, getting ready for their next feed … But even as she did so by then all she was thinking about was the monk in the village and that moment of her standing before him and feeling everything was still, like a painting she could stay standing in front of and as long as she stood there would never feel panic again or terror or deep, deep despair.

All that day she’d thought of nothing else. Remembering that feeling. Trying to get it back. So though she couldn’t really understand why she would need to look at the monk again, nevertheless she knew she’d have to – so she bundled the boys up into the pram and used picking up Winnie from playgroup as her excuse to go back to the village.

‘There’s an interesting spaceman come to visit us,’ she’d said to her daughter, meeting her at the church hall door. ‘Shall we go and see him, you and I?’

Winnie looked up at her, her hair tumbled from her morning’s play and with that lovely heat coming off her, Helen always felt, like a feeling of her daughter’s certainty, her little body so solid and fixed and sure of itself in the world.

‘Can John John and Barney come too?’ she asked. She peered down at the twins, made a face at them and they twisted with delight.

‘Of course,’ Helen said.

‘Okay.’

Which was how Helen had done it, made it seem like the most ordinary thing that she would have to go back to the same place where she’d been that morning, just to stand there again. She’d had a bag with her to do some shopping if she wanted to, as though she might be going to the square for that reason, keeping her daughter with her as a sort of alibi, to buy her an ice cream or a bag of sweets – because where would she have been sometimes in that period of her life without Winnie and that sturdy little body of hers? Set beside her in the street or in a shop and giving her a reason to be there, giving her something to do? Like a daughter’s hand can always hold on to a mother’s hand to keep the mother safe. And where, Helen thinks, would she be without that hold, even now, where?

She’d looked down at Winnie, to see if she’d thought it was odd that they weren’t going home straight away, but Winnie just stuck her thumb in her mouth and peered around Helen to wiggle her fingers at the boys as Helen pushed them along in the pram. The twins kicked and twisted again and let out little shrieks of laughter.

‘You know, he is like a real spaceman, Win,’ Helen said. ‘He’s wearing a yellow dress, though, so more like Jesus.’

Winnie nodded, the thumb stayed in her mouth. Really, it was the time for her sandwich and a glass of milk and
then her afternoon nap, Helen thought. They should be going home. Still she swung the pram around and back towards the square, thinking that if she could just see him, the monk, one more time, just put him again in the line of her vision, have that feeling that she’d had before of calmness and of still, keep the image of seeing him with her like a photo – she wouldn’t even necessarily have to go up close … But when they got there the crowd was so thick around him that she couldn’t even a catch a glimpse of his yellow robe. Then one of the boys started to cry, John, and Winnie was saying, ‘I’m
hungry
. I’m
hungry
, Mummy’ – so Helen gave up on the idea and they went home.

That had all been in the morning, and then, hours later, there was Bobby, sitting in front of her telling her about it. The crowd gathering, who’d been there with the monk, who hadn’t, what they’d said. In a way, Helen had thought, looking at him, you could say it was quite lovely, his enthusiasm for the story, the way Bobby seemed so involved, but in another way she also knew exactly how much he’d been drinking by the look in his eyes.

He grinned at her. ‘Not every day, is it? We get something like this happening in olde-worlde middle England? Middle Earth more like it. It must have given you a shock, darling. Didn’t it? When you’re the one who
saw
him, after all.’

He’d fixed her with his eyes as he said that – his pretty, deep blue eyes with that dark, private look that no one else could see except her. Which showed his hours of
nights spent alone in the kitchen with a whisky bottle, or knocking back vodka miniatures before meeting clients for lunch … It was all part of the same story. Bobby’s story.
We’re in this together
, the look said.
You are the only
one
. Helen turned away.

‘But I’m talking to you,’ Bobby had said.

‘I know.’ She could hear it in his voice then, the change. If anyone were to come into the kitchen now, a neighbour, a friend, he’d be jolly and charming and he’d be able to stay like that for another couple of hours, but here on his own, with just her …

‘I
said
I’m talking to you.’

‘What, then?’ Helen stood up from the table.

‘I’m saying that I don’t care what you saw or didn’t see. That someone needs to take charge here. Himalayas or no Himalayas.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Helen said, ‘I didn’t hear you, I was listening out for the boys.’

‘I said your monk is in the woods tonight, he should be there now. And I don’t care if he is used to it. This is England, for godsake, not the damn Indian mountains …’

Helen stopped – felt herself stopping, rather, is closer to what she means. Because she had picked up a wooden spoon and was stirring the meat in the casserole, she was doing something, but it was as if she wasn’t, as if she wouldn’t know how. There was the table, the empty bottles. The lit kitchen, dark bedrooms upstairs where the children were sleeping. There was Bobby standing, slowly, carefully opening the fridge door to reach inside.
And there she was, unable to go forward, unable to do anything at all.

Then she started to speak, ‘I had no idea—’ but Bobby interrupted her.

‘Oh, yeah,’ he continued as though she’d been in on the conversation from the beginning, had been listening to everything he’d said, as though she’d been there in the pub all along right beside him. ‘Someone said, an interpreter or someone, that’s what he was doing. That after sunset he was going to go up into the Ten Shilling Wood behind Parson’s Farm and sleep there, spend the night there on his little damn mat.’

Helen looked out the kitchen window across the garden beyond the paddock and there were the woods. She imagined that tiny, delicate man she’d seen earlier in the day walking into them, the sun going down behind the mass of branches all around him. She saw the way the last of the sun’s light might filter between the trees’ leaves, like bright coins flashing, dazzling his eyes, but quickly fading, the ground deepening and softening underfoot as he went further and further in.

She had to find him. She became aware of it that minute. That she had to go out there into the woods, up on to the hill, go through the woods and look for him. Though it seemed the most crazy thing in the world, still she had to, somehow, for some reason, find him. For
what
reason, though? Helen even now still can’t figure that part out. As a sort of recovery? Redress? To get back that feeling she’d had in the morning of stillness and of calm? Like she’d
wanted to go back later that morning to see the monk again and claim that feeling then and there’d been too many people there and she couldn’t see? Or was it more, as if by doing something unknown to her and peculiar, really – looking in the woods for a strange, unknown man – she could prove to herself the strength of what she’d felt that morning, get it back like an act of faith somehow? She didn’t know. Still she doesn’t. But she’d turned away from the window and the sunset was already blanching from the sky and what had Bobby said: ‘After sunset’? And she’d thought: I have to go there now.

‘I think you should.’

‘What?’

Bobby’s voice had interrupted her.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I think you should go into the woods to find him. Your monk, I mean. Show him some English hospitality, for godsake. You and your village ladies. I left money behind the bar so there’s a bed for him at ‘The Lion’ at least. I thought of doing that, you see. I’d thought of that at least. So go and find him, if he means so much to you that you
saw
him after all. Maybe you even, I don’t know, all you ladies, touched his robes. But just go. While I’m eating,’ Bobby said. ‘While I go to bed.’

Helen had nodded slowly. She didn’t look at Bobby, she couldn’t bear to, and she didn’t say anything straight away. She reached for a plate, ladled gravy on to it and meat and potatoes, set it down in front of him along with a knife and fork.

Then she said ‘Thank you’ to him, very quietly. As though, whether he’d intended it or not, whether she was to understand those words of his the way she did or not, whether they came from the part of him that understood her and knew what she was like, or whether he meant them as a threat, that he was testing her and that it was an offer that would quickly turn … He was giving her something. There in the midst of the children, in the house, with their sons asleep in their baskets, Winnie in her little bed … In the midst of those rooms, that kitchen here with its casserole cooking in its juices and the dishes that were too many to fit into the dishwasher piled in the sink, and the vegetables and the salad she’d meant to go together as part of the meal but were still sitting on the bench, in the midst of all this, the bottles and the beer Bobby was drinking and the wine in her own glass, the pale colour of it and needing to keep its own particular pale colour in her glass so she could be with her husband at all, be with him and look after him, with his blue eyes, be happy enough with what he did to be able to stay … As though in the midst of all of it she’d whispered ‘Thank you’ to him as though he really had given her something, as though he were letting her go.

She reached for the keys where they hung on their hook behind the kitchen door, turned back for a minute to see Bobby at the kitchen table before she stepped outside. But in those few seconds he’d gone, his head down over his plate like an animal, shovelling in great forkfuls of beef and gravy and the weight and angle of his body at the table unbalanced, as if any second he was going to fall.

It took Helen only minutes to back the car down the drive and turn up the road towards the farm. There at the third gate on the left was the little track road that ran up into the woods, and Helen turned the car in there and drove up a way until she could see the opening at the side of the road where you could pull in and park. Not many people in the village or anywhere seemed to use this place. It was supposed to be the official entrance to a proper track for ramblers and serious walkers but when she and Bobby had come here, just after they’d moved and Winnie was still a baby, when they’d still believed they might do things like that all the time as a family, make picnics, go for walks, well, though they hadn’t even got out of the car, they’d seen no walkers then, no cars. Nor afterwards, when she’d come here herself a few times, just on her own, or with Winnie, she remembered once, she didn’t know why, this was well before the twins were born, there’d been no cars here either and no feeling, when she’d ventured into the woods, of a path or a track. Maybe you needed a map, or someone to tell you exactly where to go. Whenever she’d started into the woods then, she’d had a threatening sense of the way the opening in the trees had closed behind her and she’d had to come back out after just a few minutes, following the way she’d gone, otherwise she knew she’d have been lost.

Now though, she simply parked the car, and, leaving the keys in the ignition, opened the door and, without bothering to close it behind her, walked straight in. At
once, the act of doing that, going into the woods alone, this time of the evening, to search for a monk did not seem strange or curious at all. These woods in this part of Oxfordshire are ancient beech and ash and acorn, closely planted, so once inside, amongst them, there’s the illusion of a hundred little pathways going every which way, each one inviting you further in amongst the trees in a way that makes being here inevitable. Maybe one of these is the path for the ramblers, intended by whoever it was set out the carpark, went to the trouble of erecting a sign, ‘Ten Shilling Wood Walk: circular/ten miles’, and giving instructions for views along the way and clearings. For now though, to Helen, any one of these paths may be a path or simply another way of being lost and either way it’s the same; each one seems to come for her and offer itself to her as a way for her to come further and further in.