It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (20 page)

Farther back, across the pale glint of Sawkill Creek, Bryony could make out the onion-domed silhouette of the old Hurley Mansion Carriage House. Sterling McCullough lived there.

“I saw Sterling yesterday,” Bryony heard herself say. “Over in Cranley Meadows.”

“Oh. How was he?”

“He looked bad.”

“Poor man.”

Sterling had taught political science for almost twenty years. He hadn’t published much in that time, but with his distinguished white hair and bright blue eyes, his gift for vituperative oratory, he had inspired a devoted following among several generations of students. When the financial difficulties first appeared on the horizon, and cost-cutting measures were tentatively suggested, it was Sterling who had set the tone of fierce indignation with which the more combative among the professors, Lev included, had responded. And later, when the administration suddenly bared its claws and lashed out, abolishing tenure and firing a quarter of the faculty, it was Sterling who had organized the fired professors into an action group, the Shalehaven Eighteen. But it was Sterling too—after a euphoric summer of protests and press campaigns had come to nothing—who had taken the blow to his career most deeply to heart.

It was as though he had suddenly understood that along with his job at Shalehaven, the armature of his personality had been removed. In a kind of delayed collapse, like that of a building that has gone on standing for a while out of sheer habit of verticality after its beams have rotted, he had begun abruptly crumpling in upon himself. He started to look like an old man: his eyes grew dull; his voice thickened; his presence became gray and indefinite.

“You seem as if you have something you want to tell me. Am I right?”

“No . .. Nothing in particular.”

She looked at him; the stooped bulk of his broad frame gave out an air of creaturely warmth. She felt an urge to touch him, or rather to be held by him.

“Cranley Meadows,” Lev said. “What was Sterling doing all the way over there?”

“I don’t know. He was sitting on a bench in the mall. He didn’t seem to want to talk. I’m not even sure he recognized me when I said hello.”

Bryony waited, willing Lev to question her further.

“There’s Hamal,” was all he said. “There’s Mirach, Ala-mak . . . There’s Schedir and Cassiopeia. Tycho Brahe’s supernova. You know he built himself a golden nose after he had his own sliced off?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Sorry. I’m lecturing you. Hard habit to break . . . Here, you want to look at the moon? She’s bright tonight.”

“I’m okay, Lev. You look.”

“You make it sound like there isn’t enough moon to go around.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

A clump of thin white birches caught her eye, gleaming in the dark woods like stripped wires.

“You remember Leibniz’s famous question?” Lev asked.

“Remind me.”

‘“Why should there be being and substance? Why should there not be nothing?”’

“Oh yes.”

“That’s still the definitive question for me. I ask it every time I look through one of these and see all that mass of uninhabitable cinders and gases. Why should the universe go to all the trouble of existing? Back in Leningrad—”

The birches gleamed so brightly you could make out the little black eyebrow scars on their trunks. She thought of Lev’s fondness for these trees. They reminded him of his happy days in Tomsk. He would run his hands over the taut, chalky bark of the bellying trunks with a sigh. On a walk a few weeks ago he had touched one of them and jumped back, pretending he could feel an infant kicking under the smooth skin. It had been on the morning of that day, in the doctor’s office, that Bryony and Lev had first heard the twins’ light, rapid heartbeats galloping toward them from the future.

“—Is it perhaps somehow necessary that there should be all this dead matter in order for one planet to flourish . . . I’m boring you?”

“No, go on.”

“You used to claim you enjoyed hearing me free-associate about the universe.”

“I meant it, Lev. And I still do.”

“Hm.”

He was silent a moment.

“What about you, Bryony?” he asked. “What were you doing at Cranley Meadows?”

There.

“Well. . she said.

But now that Lev had asked, a weight of dread seemed to paralyze her
_v

In the small room behind the blinds, with the Demerol ebbing throb by throb into her blood, everything had seemed to possess a transparent clarity of purpose. The image of Sterling McCullough’s haggard face, its dim, unrecognizing glance as Bryony had greeted him, had added a layer of something resembling violence to Bryony’s resolve. Thinking of him, thinking of them all, the Shalehaven Eighteen, Bryony had felt a curious sensation of remoteness. Their whole drama seemed utterly unconnected to her. They had been Lev’s friends and therefore hers, but she had never felt, fundamentally, of their world. While they were still teaching, she had been unable to shake off the reflexive shyness of a student among professors. But now, in defeat, their ashen figures revolved in her mind like ghosts: exhausted and dimly appalling.

As the doctor entered, putting Bryony’s feet in the stirrups and positioning the heavy suction apparatus, she had felt as if she were being carved free from some cold, gray, lavalike substance that had all but absorbed her into itself. It was as though some bright new creature were about to take flight from her prone body.

“Isn’t that where they firebombed that place last year? The women’s clinic?”

She nodded.

Lev looked at her kindly.

“Back in business, though, is it?”

“Yes.”

Had she said the word or only mouthed it?

“ Yes,” she said again, louder.

Lev spoke quietly, after a pause. “Well, you know, I’ve always told you, anything you do, that’s fine by me.”

“I know that, Lev.”

Again the urge to be held by him. She fought it again. It was harder this time, the urge bringing with it traces of old sweetnesses, insinuating sentiments, so that for a moment it was necessary to stand still and deliberately suppress the current of recollection— the first evenings up here with their delicate freight of tensions and broachings, Lev looming across her heart like the edge of a richly teeming shadow, the suede-soft milkweed pods just ripening, splitting open, setting adrift their glimmering strands . . .

She watched as he shifted the telescope, bringing the moon into his sights. A bright, snowy light filled the clear part of his eye. Slowly, as she observed the moonlight flickering on the foil-like back of his iris, she felt her composure return. She had the impression that she could make out the etched silver outlines of individual craters and lunar mountains glittering inside her husband’s eyeball. It occurred to her that at one time she had known the names of most of them. Now she had forgotten them all.

After her divorce June agreed to let Alan keep the London flat and moved into the small house they owned in Sussex. It was a secluded place, an old farm laborer’s cottage on the edge of a common, a mile outside the village of Three Bells Green. A century ago villagers used to gather firewood and graze animals on the common, but few people ever came there now, and it had reverted to brambles, with a thick wood in the middle, full of half-tame pheasants escaped from local pens.

The house itself had a small, neglected front garden with apple trees and overgrown rosebushes, and one of the things June had been looking forward to when she moved in was the prospect of restoring some order to this wilderness. She had also planned to take up the piano again, and to read all the books she had bought during the years of her marriage but never found time to open.

She had grown up in a cultured household where poetry and music were revered and a social gathering was an occasion for high-minded conversation. But in her own adult life things had taken a different turn. She had been beautiful as a young woman; full-figured with black hair and sharp-cornered eyes from which a deep blue light emanated. At twenty-two she’d had a child with a tennis coach who’d gone off after a few years to live in Australia. The child herself had joined him there later, when offered the choice at the age of thirteen. By then June was married to Alan, an executive at an oil exploration company.

The marriage, in retrospect, had been a series of increasingly sour amusements. First her husband had started having affairs, then she had. Most of their friends were having affairs. Politicians and the Boyal Family were having affairs. Out of nowhere the word “totty” had started appearing on everyone’s lips, and it was as if this word, which seemed to combine the bedroom with the nursery, had been the magic charm to release all London from its inhibitions, and the whole city had hurled itself into a wild, hilarious romp. For a while it really had been fun: it was nice being secretly admired and flirted with; keeping a furtive rendezvous at a Knightsbridge Hotel or a bed and breakfast out in the country; meeting a graduate student at a drinks party when Alan was abroad, and spending four days in a grotty bedsit with him; then exchanging that lover for another who insisted on sending her expensive jewelry that had to be vigilantly watched out for in the morning post, and then very carefully hidden from her extremely jealous, if simultaneously unfaithful, husband.

Being the more attractive of the two, she was better than him at infidelity. In an effort to keep up, he became incautious and indiscriminate, chasing almost every woman he met, thereby incurring a higher and higher ratio of rejection to success, with the cumulative humiliation requiring increasing quantities of alcohol to numb, which in turn made his behavior even more clumsy and crass. One night he’d stumbled home with red paint all over his suit. The next day one of June’s closest friends, an artist, phoned June to say that she had flung it at him when he came barging into her studio and refused to leave. “I did it because I wanted to be sure you’d believe me when I told you what happened, darling,” she’d said. “You know how peculiar we women can be when it comes to defending our menfolks’ honor . . .” By now the whole rigmarole of her London life had begun to wear June dow
^r
n. Bemembering the calm home of her childhood, she had felt disgusted, principally with herself. Her last act toward her husband—an affair with his elder brother—had been deliberately, vengefully cruel, and it had left her full of remorse.

So here she was, a woman of forty-two, grown a little fleshy; still capable of stalling a man’s attention with a judicious spillage of blue light from her eyes, but increasingly choosing not to; and meanwhile living alone out in the rolling countryside of the Sussex Weald. Her divorce settlement would keep her going for a couple of years, after which she would have to look for a job.

She found it easy enough to keep busy. She had signed up as a volunteer for the local Meals on Wheels, and helped organize the village fete. She read, went for long walks, and sat at her old childhood piano, sometimes gingerly embarking on some halfremembered exercise, sometimes just staring at the battered old instrument, breathing in its smell of dust and wood and furniture polish, which was the fragrance of childhood itself. Already, after less than a year, she had begun to think of this as her “new life” and she was happy with it, more or less.

Across the road bordering the far side of the common, down a long driveway, was an Elizabethan manor that had recently been sold. In March the new owners appeared: a Harley Street surgeon with his family.

June met the wife first, a thin woman, drawn and pale, who appeared on the common one Sunday morning with two dachshunds waddling behind her. After establishing that June had until recently been a weekender like herself, the woman broached the subject uppermost in all newcomers’ minds, namely the question of finding a reliable cleaning lady. June wrote down the number of her own, a Mrs. Dolfuss, who worked for a remarkably low hourly rate, came out on her bicycle in all weathers, and whose only annoying habit was occasionally to leave a religious tract on the kitchen table. Thrilled, Mrs. Crawford parted with the words “we must have you to dinner one weekend.” An invitation duly arrived, for a Saturday in April.

It was a cool evening, with a smell of damp earth in the air. June walked across the common in a pleasantly vacant state of mind. She enjoyed meeting new people, but would have been just as happy to stay at home alone, and the knowledge of this was a source of calm assurance.

A new electronic security gate stood over the fresh gravel of the drive. The property had fallen into near ruin under its previous owners, but the Crawfords seemed to have done a thorough job restoring it. The roofs of the old outbuildings had been retiled, the garden wall repointed, the oasthouse adjoining the house itself converted into a garage from which a Range Rover and a small sports car glared imperiously across the courtyard.

Mrs. Crawford—Hazel—opened the front door, her two dogs scratching along on the parquet floor beside her. They leaped up at June, wagging their tails and licking her.

“Come in. Don’t mind the dogs. They’ve just had their worm pills and they’re after the salt on your hands. Not squeamish, are you?”