Our Tragic Universe (3 page)

The wind breathed heavily down the river, and I half-looked at the little ripples and wakes in the blackish, greenish water as I tried to hurry B home. There was no sign of Libby’s car. I was watching the river, not the benches, so when someone said ‘Hello,’ I jumped. It was a man, half hidden in the gloom. B was already sniffing his ancient walking boots, and he was stroking her between her ears. He was wearing jeans and a duffel coat, and his messy black and grey hair was falling over his face. Had he seen what had happened? He must have done. Did he hear me suggest the whole thing? He looked up. I already knew it was Rowan. So he had come. Had he been coming every Sunday for all this time?

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘You’re …’

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Chilly, isn’t it?’

‘Freezing.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah. I think so. How are you?’

‘Cold. Depressed. Needed to get some fresh air. I’ve been at the Centre all day working on my
Titanic
chapter. Can you believe I’m still at it? I should be grateful I’m still alive, I suppose. Everyone said retiring would kill me.’

Rowan and his partner Lise had relocated to Dartmouth just over a year before to help look after Lise’s mother. They lived in a renovated old boathouse near the castle, with spectacular views of the mouth of the harbour. Everything inside it was tasteful and minimal: nothing was old or shabby, although it must have been once. Rowan had not yet retired when I went there for a dinner party. Lise wore too much make-up and spoke to Rowan as if he was a child. She told stories about him getting lost for three hours in a shopping mall, wearing jeans to her company’s black-tie Christmas party and breaking the new dishwasher just by touching it. I’d pictured him alone in an airy office at Greenwich University, with an open window and freshly cut grass outside, surrounded by books and drinking a cup of good coffee, secretly dreading these dinner parties. I’d wondered then why he was retiring at all.

‘Most people retire and then take up gardening or DIY, don’t they?’ I said. ‘They don’t go and get another job as director of a maritime centre. I don’t think you really are retired, by most normal definitions of the word.’

He sighed. ‘Pottering about with model ships all day. Wind machines. Collections of rocks and barnacles. Interactive tide tables. It’s not rocket science. Still, I’ve had time to take up yoga.’

So he wasn’t going to mention Libby and her car. We were going to have a ‘normal’ conversation, slightly gloomy, slightly flirty, like the ones we used to have when he came to Torquay
library every day before the Maritime Centre opened – to do paperwork – and we ended up going for lunch and coffee all the time. Would we kiss at the end of this conversation, as we had done at the end of the last one?

‘How’s your writing going?’ he asked me.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Well, sort of. I’m back on chapter one of my “proper” novel yet again, re-writing. The other day I worked out that I’ve deleted something like a million words of this novel in the last ten years. You’d think that would make it really good, but it hasn’t. It’s a bit of a mess now, but never mind.’

‘Are you still using the ghost ships?’

‘No. Well, sort of. They might come back.’

‘And how was Greece?’

I frowned. ‘I didn’t go in the end. Had too much other work on here.’

‘Oh. That’s a shame.’

‘Anyway, how about you? How’s the chapter?’

‘Oh, I keep having to read new things. I just read a hundred-page poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger about the sinking of the
Titanic
.’

‘Was it good?’

‘I’ll lend it to you. It’s about some other stuff as well as the sinking of the
Titanic
. There’s a bit where members of a religious cult are waiting on a hill for the end of the world, which is supposed to take place that afternoon. When the world doesn’t end, they all have to go out and buy new toothbrushes.’

I laughed, although I was remembering that Rowan had already lent me a book that I hadn’t read, even though I’d meant to. It was an Agatha Christie novel called
The Sittaford Mystery
, and I had no idea why Rowan had given it to me. He’d worked
on a short local project on Agatha Christie’s house on the River Dart, which was how he’d come to read the books. But I couldn’t imagine he’d found anything that would interest me. I spent enough time messing around with genre fiction anyway.

‘Sounds great,’ I said. ‘Sounds a bit like a book I’m reviewing, except the book I’m reviewing isn’t great.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s all about how the universe will never end, and how we all get to live for ever. I hate it, and I don’t know why.’

‘I don’t want to live for ever.’

‘No. Me neither.’

‘What’s the point of living for ever? Living now is bad enough.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Are you OK?’ he asked me again.

‘Yeah. Did you just say you’re doing yoga, or did I imagine it?’

‘No, you didn’t imagine it. I am doing yoga.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘Bad knees. Getting old. We’re not long back from a yoga holiday in India, actually. Missed Christmas, which was good. Saw some kingfishers too.’ Rowan stroked B’s head again while I looked away. I knew that his casual ‘we’ meant he and Lise. Long-term couples often did that, I’d noticed: referred to themselves as ‘we’ all the time. Whenever I phoned my mother and asked, ‘How are you?’ she replied, ‘We’re fine.’ I never talked about Christopher and me in that way. Maybe it would come in time. Not that I’d know how to use it, since we hardly ever did anything together. And we were never fine. We were even less fine since I’d kissed Rowan, because I knew that if I could kiss someone
else, then I could never kiss Christopher again. In the last five months he hadn’t really noticed this.

‘How’s Lise?’ I asked. ‘Is she still working on her book?’

I ran retreats twice a year for Orb Books ghostwriters in a clapped-out hotel in Torquay. These were supposed to teach already talented writers the finer points of plotting and structure and the Orb Books ‘method’. Orb Books didn’t mind if I charged a few local people to come too, so whenever a retreat was scheduled I put up posters in the Harbour Bookshop and usually got three or four takers. Lise had come to one the previous year. She had been planning to use some of her retirement to write a fictionalised account of her parents’ experiences in the war, but as far as I knew she hadn’t retired yet. She still took the train to London twice a week and worked at home the rest of the time.

Rowan shrugged. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh.’

He reached down and played with one of B’s ears, making it stand up and then flop down again.

‘Your dog’s quite lovely,’ he said.

‘I know. Thanks. She’s being quite patient while you abuse her ears.’

‘I think she likes it.’

‘Yeah, she probably does.’

‘I meant to say … I’ve been looking at some of the cultural premonitions connected with the
Titanic
recently,’ Rowan said. ‘And I thought of you.’ He looked down at the ground, then at one of B’s ears and then up at me. ‘I mean, I thought you’d be interested. I wondered if I should get in touch with you.’

‘Get in touch with me any time.’ I blushed. ‘Just email me. What’s a cultural premonition?’

‘Writing about the disaster before it happened, or painting pictures of it. Lots of people did.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So it’s paranormal in some way?’ I could feel myself wrinkling my nose.

‘No. Cultural. The premonitions are cultural rather than supernatural.’

‘How?’

‘It’s like … Have you heard of the Cottingley Fairies?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘Remind me to tell you about them sometime. It’s quite an interesting case-study in how people decide to believe in things, and what people want to believe. I’d guess that there are usually cultural explanations for supernatural things if you look hard enough.’

‘They weren’t on the
Titanic
as well?’

‘Huh?’

‘These fairies.’

‘No. They were in my old home town.’

‘I thought your old home town was in the Pacific.’

‘After I left San Cristobal I was in Cottingley before I went to Cambridge. My mother came from Cottingley, although she was dead by the time I left San Cristobal. Mind you, the fairies were long before that.’ He frowned. ‘I’ll tell you the whole story sometime, but it’s too complicated now. I thought you might have heard of them. Silly, really, bringing them up.’

‘Oh. Well, I know a good joke about sheep that’s all about how people decide to believe things, if that’s of any interest.’

He smiled in the gloom. ‘What is it?’

‘OK. A biologist, a mathematician, a physicist and a philosopher are on a train in Scotland. They see a black sheep from a train window. The biologist says, “All sheep in Scotland are black!” The physicist says, “You can’t generalise like that. But we know at least one sheep in Scotland is black.” The mathematician strokes his beard and says, “All we can really say for sure is that one side of one sheep in Scotland is black.” The philosopher looks out of the window, thinks about it all for a while and says, “I don’t believe in sheep.” My father used to tell it as if it said something about the perils of philosophy, although I wondered whether it said something else about the perils of science. My father is a physicist.’

Rowan laughed. ‘I like that. I like sheep. I believe in them.’

‘Did you know they can remember human faces for ten years, and recognise photographs of individual people?’

‘So when they fix you with that stupid look they’re actually memorising you?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Like those machines at Heathrow. But why?’

‘Who knows? Maybe sheep will take over the world. Maybe that’s their plan. Another plot for Zeb Ross, perhaps. I’ll have to tell Orb Books.’

I wasn’t really supposed to talk to anyone about Zeb Ross, and everyone who worked on the series signed NDAs. But in reality you can’t pretend not to be writing a novel when you are, and pretty much everyone knew that those kinds of books were ghosted – except, perhaps, for their readers, particularly the ones who sent Zeb fan mail asking what colour his eyes were, and whether he was married.

B was now trying to get on Rowan’s lap. I pulled her off,
wondering what I smelled of as I leaned over him. And I didn’t mean to look into his eyes, but when I did I saw that they were shining with tears. ‘Hay fever’ is what people usually say when they are crying; it’s what I say, but not in February. I imagined Christopher walking along the river and finding me looking into Rowan’s eyes, and then seeing my eyes suddenly full of tears, because when someone I care about cries I always want to cry too. He never knew about the lunches, or the kiss. Suddenly, joking about sheep didn’t seem quite right, even though Rowan was still smiling. I didn’t say anything for a moment.

‘Why did she do it?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘Libby Miller. Why did she push her car in the river?’

‘She’s the one I told you about ages ago. She’s having a tragic love affair. Didn’t you hear what we were saying?’

‘No. I only got here just as she pushed it in.’

‘Oh. Well.’

‘I won’t say anything.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Funny how things just go, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘The car in the river. It’s just
gone
.’

‘It’s for the best, I’m sure,’ I said.

Rowan got up to leave, and I felt like a melting iceberg as I said goodbye and walked away from him. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I could have emailed him any time I’d wanted to. I could have got in touch to tell him I’d read the book he’d lent me, but I hadn’t. I could have emailed him to write off the kiss as a mistake and tell him how much I missed our friendship. As I walked away, I imagined going back and
asking him if he had come out tonight because of me, and then him looking puzzled and saying it was all just a coincidence.

Was it a coincidence that we’d ended up at the library together? It must have been. I didn’t usually tell people that I worked in the library every weekday. It was such a weird thing to do when I had a perfectly good house to work in, and if I ever mentioned my asthma and the damp people didn’t understand why I just didn’t simply move. I recognised Rowan the first day he came to work at the library. He seemed to recognise me, too. After we’d spent a day or so just nodding and smiling at one another I showed him how to get his emails on his laptop rather than the library computers and then he took me to Lucky’s for lunch to say thanks. Over lunch we realised we had friends – Frank and Vi – in common. Frank had been my lecturer almost twenty years before, and he and Vi had been something like a second set of parents for me since then. Rowan had been at Goldsmiths before he got his chair in history at Greenwich, and had met Frank there. Vi was an anthropologist, and she and Rowan had really hit it off and ended up working together on re-enactment projects. They’d wanted to reconstruct the voyage of the
Beagle
, but could never secure any funding. But they did once spend a successful couple of weeks in Norfolk re-enacting Captain Cook’s death on Hawai’i with their postgraduate students.