The Kindness (8 page)

She was almost out of sight. He panicked, unable to think of a thing to shout. He patted his pockets impotently. All he had on him was the key to his bike lock and a wrap of tobacco. There was nothing he could pretend she’d lost. He watched her vanish round the edge of the trees, hands helplessly hanging at his sides as she disappeared. He ran to the copse, stumbling across mounds of grass, but there was no sign of her. Brambles snatched. Out of breath, he leant against a tree trunk. Through the leaves he could see only crows circling, their callous cries echoing.

Several times in the days that followed he went back to the Downs, but there was never any sign of her. He attempted to read the necessary books at his digs and at night he worked his shifts at the Crown among the insolent drunks, pulling pints and mopping slops. As he closed up the following Friday, Karl asked him what was wrong.

‘I have fallen in love,’ Julian said. ‘It’s giving me pains here,’ and he pointed to his heart.

‘Don’t talk to me of your heart,’ Karl said. ‘It’s your pituitary gland you’ve got to thank for this madness. Dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, norepinephrine, vasopressin . . .’

‘Oh stop it!’

‘. . . and serotonin,’ Karl said. ‘People who say they’re in love have serotonin levels the same as OCD patients, that’s the reason you can’t stop thinking about her. Same as people who have to keep washing their hands, long after they’ve grown sore.’

Julian snorted.

‘You may laugh, but consider for one moment the prairie voles.’ Karl was warming to his theme, his hands miming two little rodents. ‘Constant hots for each other. Ooh, so in love. At it far more than is strictly necessary for reproduction, little love nests in the long grass, seeking out special tidbits . . . however, give this lovesick male a drug that suppresses vasopressin, and he’s off, Mrs Prairie Vole the last thing on his mind.’

‘It happened the moment I saw her,’ Julian said, ignoring his friend.

‘Yes, your pituitary gland threw a little cocktail party for you.’

He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He remembered the leap of his heart the moment he saw her, all sorts of less poetic places leapt too. Kidneys, stomach, gall bladder, bowel. The shape of his love was littered with organs.

His mother called to remind him about coming home for her birthday and his mind drifted constantly to the girl with the hawk. How would he ever find her again?

‘Seeing you will be better than any fancy present,’ Jenna was saying. ‘I miss you . . . And swimming. You’re the only other person brave enough. We’ll cook fish in the tin bucket, chill the wine in the river.’ She promised all the usual Firdaws things and he tried not to hear relief as well as delight in her voice when he told her that he wouldn’t dream of missing it.

‘I’ll be there.’ He sounded terse to his own ears. Sometimes he felt he was offering his mother scraps from his table.

There would be plump artichokes ready for him in the garden, trees heavy with plums, soft roses, the river flowing, and between the crab-apple trees the hammock hanging like a smile in a landscape as familiar to him as the face of his mother.

Every birthday Jenna swam a mile or so down the river. She dived from the high bank where they picnicked on a mid-August day on which the sun never dared not to shine. The river was wide there, a pool of glassy black water with purple loosestrife fringing its banks, a few swan feathers scattered around. She never once shrieked from the cold but surfaced shouting incitements to those brave, amorous or drunk enough to follow her in. It looked inviting, always, with lily pads and flowers blooming among the reflections of the trees, but it was cold enough to ache your bones and further along it became sinister and weedy as the blackthorns closed in.

Nettled banks rose vertically and the density and barbed branches of the thorn bushes made it impossible to clamber up until almost a mile or so downriver. From there, she strode barefoot through the golden stubble fields, shaking water from her hair, exultant in her black swimsuit. Her annual triumph. There was always an obliging sunset and usually dear old Michael would play his harmonica. As his mother talked, Julian could almost summon the taste of the fish that they ate with soft brown bread and watercress, the smoky smell as Jenna lifted the tea towel from its tin bucket of hickory embers.

‘I’ve found an incredible present for you,’ he lied. ‘I can’t wait for you to see it . . .’

The quest for Jenna’s ‘incredible’ present shook him from his mope. In Swallow Street he chained his bike to a lamp-post by the head shop, waved to Pete the hippie, and headed for the antiques and bric-à-brac arcade. The first thing to catch his eye was a collection of brass padlocks at Geldings Antiques – some Victorian, some earlier – and all polished to such a shine he felt like a magpie, he liked them so much, one in particular shaped like a heart. The price tag hung from a thin strip of red ribbon. He winced at what was written there. These shops were not priced for students.

He wandered from the padlocks to check that his favourite fantasy buy was still on display. And there it was, flamboyant on its stage: a wind-up mahogany gramophone with gleaming trumpet like a strumpet kicking her skirts.

He stood for a while, just staring at the gramophone and musing, rolling his cigarette. He’d been bad-tempered all week because of that girl with the hawk, was beginning to wish she’d stayed in his dreams. He’d been ungracious with his mother, even though she had offered to fund his train fare to Firdaws. He imagined the gramophone on the grass beside the river: Billie Holiday or Patti Page. How astonished Jenna would be.

Crosby, Stills and Nash floated from a radio, their celestial harmonies soothing him. He felt almost peaceful for the first time in days as he perfected his cigarette. He tilted his head to lick the paper and glanced at a large oil painting hanging on the back wall of the shop in which a cormorant dried its wings against a background of emerald green. His eye was instantly diverted to an ornate gilt mirror standing beside it. His girl was reflected there: Julia. Rusty-brown sundress, hair tumbling and bare shouldered, she was watching him silently, biting the corner of her lip.

He was standing right beside her, close enough to touch. ‘It’s exactly right,’ he said as she described the mirror’s fine provenance and he tried not to gulp as she told him the price. He studied her eyes in its reflection. Her pale irises had liminal rings of darkest blue, like ink that had seeped to the edges.

‘What I like best is that the angel’s face shows such tender concern,’ she spoke in a near whisper. Her hair looked so soft he wanted to touch it.

‘The frame,’ she reminded him. The carved angel whose folded wings enclosed one edge of the mirror could’ve been a crow or a crone for all he cared.

‘He looks a bit like Marlon Brando,’ she said.

‘Huh?’

‘The angel. Don’t you think?’ She kept her gaze steady and they continued staring straight at one another in the mirror.

Seven

He missed Jenna’s birthday by a week. He travelled with the mirror and the drunks on the last train out of town. The train of shame.

The moon kept pace as the train hurtled west and the air was heavy with the perfumed-garden-of-hell of the toilet. He took Yeats from his pocket and put him on the table and, twirling a matchstick between his teeth, rested his head to the window and stared at the moon, but saw only Julia, thought only of her.

He shook himself from a dream of falling and woke with a start just one stop before his station, Julia’s steady gaze still floating before him. He shuffled sideways with the mirror in his arms to the front four carriages, cursing himself aloud. Horton’s platform is shorter than the train: of course it is,
stupid
. The mirror was an awkward travelling companion and a tear had started in a corner of its wrapping. Together they tumbled on to an empty midnight platform. Oh for fuck’s sake, why wasn’t his mother there to meet him? Did she really think he meant it when he said he’d be happy to walk?

He briefly considered kicking the package but settled instead for speaking sternly to it as he trudged from the station. Would his mother even like it? It was a bit fancy: ‘Rococo’, according to Julia. Mist rose through the village and the sweet smell of silage and manure reminded him he was home. A dog howled across the valley and was answered with a chorus of barks. The wrapping tore a little more: at one corner the wing of an angel was trying to escape. He marched on, clutching it like an unwilling dance partner, trying not to bump it with his knees, avoiding the ruts in the road that suggested he trip and earn himself seven years’ bad luck into the bargain.

His conscience loomed out of the mist, keeping pace beside him, sneering at the gift whose very expensiveness now seemed tawdry.
Think that’ll absolve you for ruining the whole day? Fancy not making it home for her birthday. You promised. She even sent you the fare . . .

He adjusted his grip on the mirror. In the darkness there was a sudden screech and his scalp tightened. The bobbing lights and the distinctive rattle of his mother’s ancient Land Rover had never been more welcome.

‘Hang on, Mum, I need to stash this in the back,’ he said as she cranked open the door. She hopped out into the road, exclaiming about his lateness, the length of his hair. He batted her off, scooting round for the dog blankets to wrap around the mirror.

‘Go away, nosey, it’s your present.’ He blocked her with his shoulder as she reached up and tried to part the hair that had taken to falling across his eyes.

She ground through the gears as they headed for home and he sensed her stifling a sob. ‘What is it, Mum?’

‘Something. Later . . .’ Again the choked sound.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it for your birthday.’ The road was bumpy, the smell of the dogs all-pervading as always.

She shushed him. ‘Oh, that. You’re not to worry about it, not at all.’ But he couldn’t make out her face in the dark.

He began telling her about Julia – the hawk, her startling beauty, the luck of finding her again – but it was all sounding too fanciful and all she said was: ‘Uh-huh. Uh-huh.’

Arriving at Firdaws the smell of home turned him tender: wet earth and roses, honeysuckle, farmyards, cows as before, newly cut hay and fruit on the trees burnished by the summer he’d all but missed. He took several deep breaths, each as satisfying as the air gulped down after crying.

He gave in then to Jenna’s hugs, a long sigh: ‘It’s so lovely to be here.’ Some geese started up on the banks of the river. The earth and stones crunched beneath his feet and skittering terriers leapt at him, nipping at his pockets.

Inside Firdaws, woodsmoke and chintz, the familiar welcome. Bowls of roses dropping petals to the floor. He propped the mirror carefully against the wall in the kitchen and thought: I’ll tell her everything.

‘. . . So, there she was, this beautiful woman I’d only just met, waiting for me to finish my shift, sitting on the bonnet of her little Fiat reading her book by streetlamp. And that’ – he nodded to the package – ‘all wrapped up and waiting for me on the back seat.’ Julia had promised to deliver from the shop, and she was true to her word. It was ready for him in layers of shiny red paper, even a bow.

‘All part of the service,’ she said, and when she jumped down from the car he found himself lifting the fingers of her left hand to his lips and kissing them. She made a joke of his courtly behaviour and smiled and curtsied but didn’t pull her hand away. On her fingers he could smell the leather of the gauntlet she wore to fly the hawk.

‘Oh, shush.’ Why wouldn’t his mother listen properly? She was all but drowning him out clattering about: filling the kettle, water from the tap thumping, interrupting him to offer stew, a sandwich.

‘Or would you prefer a gin?’ She gestured to the green bottle wrapped in white paper on the sideboard.

He nodded, and when she’d poured the gin and cracked the ice they clinked glasses. ‘Ah, I’m sorry, I should’ve got an earlier train.’ Jenna looked well past her bedtime. As she lifted her glass he noticed grey pouches at the corners of her mouth. The cat yawned rudely on the table between them, confident that neither of them would dream of shooing it off. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, she’d heard. He changed the subject.

‘So, who did you persuade to swim with you down the river?’

‘Oh, Michael, of course,’ she said, sloshing another couple of fingers of gin into their glasses.

Julian snorted. ‘You’re lucky it didn’t kill him.’

‘I am,’ she said.

The cat’s purr was almost deafening as he nubbled it under the chin. For a moment he found it hard to keep looking at her. She appeared so strained: thinner than at Christmas, a little deflated in her dress of worn-out-looking daisies. He used to see it when people said that he was her spitting image but not so much since her bones had started showing through.

He stalled for a moment, unable to decide what to tell her of that glorious first night with Julia. In his haste it all came tumbling out. Leaping up the stairs to his digs, Julia behind him, scooping papers, books, socks from the chairs to make a space, wishing he had fresh milk in the fridge.

All night with nothing to judge them but the slimmest rib of a moon. In the morning waking to Julia tiptoeing for the door. He sprang from the sheets to wrestle her back, pulling down her sundress, but she fended him off: ‘No! I can’t be late. I’ve got the hawk to see to before work. I must defrost some chicks and mice. Ugh.’ Wrinkling her adorable nose: ‘To be honest I’d rather not deal with Lucifer and his disgusting diet at all, but when my husband’s away there isn’t much choice but do it.’ Husband. It was the first time she said the word that made his spirits plummet. Husband. When he kissed her goodbye he thought that no smell would ever be more erotic than the smell of leather on her fingers, an indication that Chris, this husband of hers, was away and Lucifer in her care.