The China Factory (15 page)

‘I popped the question and he looked at me for a moment and then he said, “Oh, I don't think so, babe… I'd make a bad husband.” “That's ok,” I told him, “I quite like bad husbands… I've had two. They amuse me.”'

Romy had stared at Susan, taking a moment too long to register the words.

‘Rosemary, honey, I'm
kidding
! That's a line!'

Bob was more boy than man, at times sluggish, other times volatile. He had fine Germanic features and blue eyes and straight blond hair. On their first trip to Ireland they found the cottage in the northwest and returned each summer. They converted the outhouses into a studio with white walls and a wooden floor and
skylights in the roof. Every morning Susan donned an old shirt, and stood at her easel with her brushes and paint and her music swirling around her, composing and painting the large canvasses that shocked Romy with their derelict beauty. Limestone walls, ancient stone circles, blue-grey mountains and white suns, haunting portals and archways and always some mysterious figure at the edge—human or animal or bird—a lurking presence that made something flip over inside Romy and render her silent.

The afternoon was warm and still. She moved towards Michael and away from him, repeatedly. She feared the return of the Americans but did not know why. She made coffee and placed a mug at his elbow and then walked to the window.

‘I think I'll go back to work,' she said.

He twisted his body towards her. ‘You're joking.'

‘No, I'm serious.'

They looked at each other. ‘I knew this would happen,' he said.

‘I have too much time. I don't need all this time.'

‘You did before. You wanted time. That's what you wanted, you said.'

‘That was then.'

She had thought she would recreate the long mornings of her youth spent in libraries. She thought she might recover something in the poems and novels from those years and take it back out with her, take it home to Michael, to both of them. But the words did not affect her in the way they once had, as if, in the intervening years, she had shed some of her imagination, or access was denied, or there was not enough room in her head for such words any more.

He turned back to his laptop, lifted the briefcase from the floor and removed some files. She looked out the window. She could not tell him that she was afraid. Lately, she was preoccupied with a feeling of hopes sinking. She woke at night primed for sounds in the dark, for the flapping of a moth's wings too close to her face or the screech of a late-night siren on the city streets. Her fear was odd
and diffuse. She waited to hear her name on Michael's sleeping breath, or for a word to come to her, or a dream—a sign that the world was all right and it was all in her head. Michael would rise early and shave and head out into the morning and for a moment it seemed that everything was in order, as it should be, as it always had been.

‘You could always have a child,' he said then.

She almost smiled at the release his words brought, as if they'd been banked up treacherously between them. Outside she heard the blackbird trill, like a plea,
Hear me, hear me…
over and over. He turned his face to her. ‘Well?'

‘I don't know. And stop bringing it up slyly, like that.'

She went back to her chair in the sun. She used to think that a child might return her to poetry. That what the poets had once granted her—those brief encounters with the sublime—a child might too. But she would read a poem and feel the approach of something terrible. Fear and sadness without cause. Still she would keep returning to the poem. And then, one day, it came to her: a child would do the same. She could not trust herself to love a child without obsession. She might raise a child brimming with fears. She might grow to fear the child itself.

She felt Michael move about inside. She closed her eyes. It was his name that had first drawn her. It had evoked tenderness in her. She knew of no Michael who was not a good man. In the early days they walked about the city, finding pubs and cafés in whose dark corners they would hunker down. In the evenings he cooked for her and she fell under his spell. She slipped off her sandals and raised her bare feet onto his lap and, still talking, he took them in his hands. His touch, his burn on her, consumed her. After they were married he'd come home from work and they'd open wine and he'd talk of his day, and they'd sit there in glorious union. She could never have too much of him. But then, when the wine wore
off, a little fear would steal in and occupy her. She thought she would get all used up, and he would know this. She thought there would never be enough of her for him.

In the afternoon she sat in the cool bedroom. The cottage had thick white walls and cold slate floors, softened with scatter rugs. His question lingered in her head, and, unexpectedly, a memory pressed in, from a winter's evening in London a few years before. They had emerged out of the Underground onto the crowded street at Earl's Court, tired and thoughtful and separate after a day wandering in the city. A mist began to fall, softly, magically, making the orange lights and the whole street opaque. She stopped and gazed up at this strange, vaporous light and when she went to move, a sea of dark faces encircled her. They pressed closer, soundless, menacing. She opened her mouth to say something. She felt a hand rough on her breast. She wheeled around but she was penned in. She saw Michael's blue rain jacket up ahead. She called his name. The gang pressed tighter. They will kill me, she thought, they will drag me into that alley and rape me and kill me before he has turned around. But then he turned and took in the scene, and, wordlessly, beckoned to her.
Come on, come on
. She stepped to the right and the pack swarmed with her.
Come on, hurry up
, his eyes were saying. She stiffened her shoulders and pushed out through the ring of youths and up the street towards him. She thought he would open his arms.
What the hell was that?
he asked. She looked around for a lamppost, a ledge, a shop window to lean on.

She looked around the bedroom now. If she were ever pregnant he would distance himself from her in public. He would not be proud to declare his paternity, like other men, men who walk beside their slow, swollen wives and lay a hand on the small of their backs, to take the strain.

Late in the afternoon she strolled down the lane, running her
fingers along the frilled edges of ferns. A yellow ESB van passed the gate and stopped a little further on. Four or five young men climbed out and began to unload large spools of cable and equipment from the van and then rolled the cable into a nearby field. She heard a rustling in the bushes, a bird hidden in its depths, and she turned and walked back to her chair and her book. When she looked up a while later an ESB man in a yellow helmet had begun the vertical ascent of a pole. Voices drifted across to her. Her book fell to the ground. Then Michael was beside her. He said, ‘Hi.' His look held an appeal.

An engine started up and they turned their heads. The ESB van began to advance slowly on the lane beyond the hedge. A shout went up from the top of the pole. A cable attached to the climber's safety belt lifted into the air and grew taut. The van moved along, oblivious, dragging the cable until the pole began to lean sideways. Then a shout went up from below and she saw the climber drop, feet first, to the ground. Michael swore and began to run. She followed him down the lane out on to the road. She stepped up on the grass verge. The young men were bent over their fallen friend. They called his name, urgently. Seamus. Their accents were local, the clear clipped sounds of the north. Michael went into the field, looking like a man who could help.

‘Don't move him. Keep talking to him.' She saw that the men were little more than boys. Their faces were pale and grave. She heard the clang of iron gates and running feet.

And then, miraculously, the fallen man stirred. The circle of comrades tightened, opened out briefly, then tightened again. She caught a glimpse of his head lifting slowly off the ground, as he emerged out of his strange remote world. His face came into view and raised itself to the sun.

Bob and Susan brought back trout and cooked it for dinner. They put on music and placed lighted candles on the table and the
windowsill. Michael declined the wine, joking that he needed to keep his senses while those around him lost theirs. Outside the light was fading. They talked of travel and holidays and houses. Bob and Susan were hunting for an old brownstone in Chicago. They described exactly the kind they wanted. Romy excused herself and went out to the scullery. She ran the cold tap and stood looking out the window. She remembered the young ESB men's faces as their friend came to. She thought of them around his hospital bed at that moment, smiling, joking, changed. Saying his name over and over, as if they might glean something in its syllables, some hint of the marvellous.

Beyond the window a patch of rough ground led down to the sea. She watched lights flickering on the far peninsula. She did not know what she felt. She did not know what was coming. She thought that this couple, Susan and Bob, had somehow, inexplicably, brought misfortune down on top of them. She wanted to return to the way things were before. She crossed the kitchen and when she passed the table they were all laughing. In the bedroom Michael's shirt hung on the back of a chair. His briefcase stood packed and ready for the return to the city. She stared at the chrome clasps and then crossed the floor and flipped them open. She put a hand inside and urgently searched the slim fabric compartments.

A month before she had found something. He had been in the shower that day, preparing to leave for a big meeting with a client; he had been tense and harried all morning, liable to err. The briefcase was on the dining room table, packed and ready, then as now. His mobile phone began to ring inside, and, thinking the call vital, she leaned over and popped open the clasps. The phone rang off and she could not explain what had driven her to grope in the dark compartments as if seeking an answer to a question not yet formed. She found a brown envelope, and inside a passport-sized photo. A small boy with dark hair and a solemn face looked out at her. She turned the photo over and on the back, a name and a date,
in blue ink:
Ross, b. 19 April 2004
. From inside the envelope, she drew out an acknowledgement slip with the letterhead of their city lawyer, and three words, handwritten in black:
All sorted, Tony
.

When she returned to the table Bob refilled her glass. He got up and announced that he was putting on Schubert. She knew before the approach of the first note that it would arc its way into her and with each successive note there would be an unravelling.

‘A man almost died here today,' she blurted out, and they all turned to her.

‘Oh, I knew there was something we had to tell you,' Michael said, seeking and then holding her look.

She watched his mouth move as he told the story. He paused every now and then to let her contribute but there was nothing she could add. Afterwards, Susan switched on the lamps. They were talking about European cities then. Bob and Susan argued gently over Venice, he insisting it was a crowded, overrated city for tourists, she pleading its history, its architecture, its light.

‘What it had in the past has been lost,' Bob said. ‘All that literary and artistic weight has pulled it down. Now it's just a bunch of beautiful empty buildings, gazing at their own reflection in the water.'

‘It's a lovers' city,' Susan said, ‘a bit like Paris in that respect. It's a city one must see with a lover.'

‘I don't know,' Michael said. ‘Romy and I fought all the time in Venice. I couldn't stand the heat and the crowds and the narrow alleys.' He met her eyes for an instant.

‘We spent a lot of time complaining too, Susan, if I remember correctly,' Bob said.

‘I think maybe the lover should be new,' Susan continued. ‘You know that early stage when you know very little about each other… and it's all to play for and you're in a kind of glow.'

‘Go on then,' Michael said. ‘We're all ears.'

‘No, it's nothing, really,' Susan said.

But he pleaded, mockingly, until she relented.

‘It was before I met Bob, of course! Or Duncan! I had just arrived in Paris and I was waiting in line for a phone to try to book a room. There was a guy behind me, an American too, also looking for a hotel room. We got talking. He was twenty-eight, a doctor—handsome—on his first trip to Europe. Well, actually, he was getting over a divorce. Anyway we had no luck with the phone so we went to a small café where we found another phone and we each took turns calling around while the other one stayed with the luggage. Eventually I got a room—one room with three beds—so I took it, and I gave him the option of sharing. So we checked in and then went off to see the city and later we had dinner. And the next day we did the same and we… fell in love, I guess… People fall in love remarkably easily. He was a sweet guy. We were in a beautiful city… he made me feel safe. We were lovers for a week.'

In the lamplight she had grown seductive, and the story, slipping from her, added a new dimension, made her vulnerable. Her long slender neck reminded Romy of Picasso's gored horse that they'd seen in Barcelona—the beautiful white horse brought to its knees, the tip of a sword emerging from the ground, poised to pierce the pearl-white neck, spurt blood from the jugular.

‘And then?' Michael asked, ‘What happened then?'

‘Oh, we had to say goodbye. He was going on to Rome and I had to return to the States.'

Nobody spoke for a while.

‘I read some research recently,' Susan said then, ‘that proved men are actually more prone to falling in love at first sight than women.'

In the candlelight Romy looked across at Michael. His eyes met hers and she felt herself surrender.

Later on they piled into the car and Michael drove them up the
mountains. The road rose and they rounded bends and the headlights shone high in the trees, like searchlights. The radio was on low and a woman sang the blues. After a few minutes, without warning, Michael switched it off.