The Line Between Us (21 page)

“Show me how,” you whispered, touching the buttons of my shirt, undoing the first, then the second. “I’ve never ...”

I opened my eyes and for a moment I was dazzled, like some woodland creature caught in the beam of the poacher’s torch. You were glistening, the candlelight gleaming on your skin and in the lustre of your hair. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I broke away. “This isn’t right –” I said. “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t be – we can’t – do this.”

You kissed me again in answer, a brief, obliterative kiss.

“We mustn’t,” I said, putting you from me, holding you at the length of my arm. I bowed my head. “I’ve made promises. Promises I have to keep.”

“But what about ...?”

I watched the redness of your mouth as you spoke, the mesmeric shapes your lips made. I had enormous difficulty in hearing what you were saying.

“... what about this? What about – us?”

“There can’t be an us. There mustn’t be. I’m married. You’d be finished if we were found out. Your reputation –”

You shrugged your white, white shoulders.

“And there’s Jenny,” I said, “I have to think about her.”

“Ah,” you whispered, “Jenny.” You reached unsteadily for your glass. “Mrs Ifor. Is it like this when you and she –?”

“We don’t,” I said swiftly. “That side of things never really – worked, between us. We haven’t – for ages. We don’t.” You took a sip of champagne and I couldn’t help thinking that only a minute ago I had been the drink you drank. I swallowed hard and reached behind me for Jenny’s chair, then sat down heavily.

“I suppose that’s some kind of consolation.” You dipped your finger into the wine then ran it broodingly round the rim of your glass. “You can sound a note, apparently,” you said, “If you know how. You can make music.” Your mouth turned down. “Though I don’t seem to have the knack.”

“What do we do now?”

“I suppose we do nothing.” There was a slight turbulence in your voice as you spoke, a squall you had to master before you went on. “That’s what we seem to be saying. It is what we’re saying, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t answer. I pictured Jenny in some draughty hall in Nottingham trying to better herself, jotting down the lecture notes with her usual proficiency. She had taken to wearing glasses for reading and I imagined her pushing them back to the bridge of her nose as she listened to the speaker. I could see her bent over her exercise book writing at such speed that the words threatened to unravel and the earnestness of the image was worse than any reproach that she could level at me. I cast my gaze way back to the young lad out drinking at the Fleece with Mr Brown on the night before his wedding. I’ll be a good husband. I’ve made up my mind. I will. The buttons of my shirt were still undone and I remembered you undoing them and the song that had sung inside me then fell silent.

“You were right to ... draw a line. I shouldn’t have thrown myself at you. I’ve had a beastly night.” You stood up abruptly, “I’ve probably had too much to drink, in any case. It’s an occupational hazard if you own a vineyard.” I saw you straighten your shoulders, assuming the poise you had acquired at finishing school all those years ago: the cool politeness, the defensive grace. “It won’t happen again.” You crossed over to the door and opened it. “Good night, Ifor,” you said tiredly as you let the latch fall shut behind you.

My wife came home from Nottingham radiant with all the learning, her face flushed and alive. She told me about the lectures and the seminars at great length, looking sideways at me to see if I was listening and I was listening, to remind myself of the choice I’d made, to blot out the rasp and whisper of what had happened, which hissed like static in my head. I watched her as she was speaking and for a moment her ardour was reminiscent of the earnest, myopic girl that I first met and I felt the current of emotion that was seething inside me switch and shift: the cataclysmic desire I had for you colliding with the remorseful affection I felt for my wife. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for her. I cared enough to stop myself from having you, to stop you from taking me. That’s how much I cared. So I listened and I told her about my trip to Mynydd Maen and said I’d finished the quarterly accounts. I neglected to mention that I had given up a fundamental part of myself – a dream rendered derelict: the windows broken, the roof stoved in and all the people gone.

“Jenny –” for a fraction of a second I thought that perhaps I could tell her; that the gulf between you and me could become the demarcation of a better, fuller married life; that we might knit up the threads of communion which had worn so thin.

I could feel the passing speculation of her gaze as her eyes rested on me for a moment. “I’m fair worn out,” she yawned with an indolence I hadn’t seen in her before, or hadn’t noticed. “Think I’ll turn in early.” She mounted the stairs, and as she climbed the last few treads she started humming and I could hear her cross the landing and close our bedroom door behind her.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

I remembered the evening that Brown died. He’d been the teacher of my younger self, my pathfinder, my drinking companion, my counsellor, the repository of everything I knew about music, about the wider world. He was the father I should have had and lost. He was my friend in both need and deed and the night he died almost had the finishing of me.

There had been a heaviness about him, a profound aura of distraction, and it became harder than ever to rouse him from his thoughts of an evening.

“Do you fancy a walk up to the Fleece?”

“Not tonight, my boy.”

“How about a drive over to Newland?”

“I don’t think so. Thank you for asking.”

“Whist, then? Or cribbage?”

Mostly he was rooted to the wireless, the Murphy A3 on full volume straining every valve because he was becoming hard of hearing. He’d sit forward in his armchair, leaning close to the grey grille silk, shaking his head at the way the world was turning. The crisis in Czechoslovakia got right under his skin – the German army just walking in and helping themselves. Before we knew it, we were up to our necks in civil defence exercises. Parry the Paint put himself forward as the new air raid warden for Morwithy and all of us had to troop up to the village hall to collect our gas masks and the Home Office handbook about what to do in the event of an attack. I was sat in the dugout with Brown the night that the Archbishop of York led the nation in prayer: if we are called to suffer in a just cause we must be brave and constant.

He took terrible offence at that. “The man that doesn’t know what he’s saying. We’ve been brave. We’ve been constant. We don’t need to take lessons in just causes.” He rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand. “We fought the war to end all wars, chum,” he said, addressing the wireless bitterly. “Beg pardon, my boy,” he sighed, slumping back in his chair so that dust from the horsehair stuffing rose into the air.

The last time I saw him alive he was striding across the courtyard, fulminating. I was with Jenkins and we were wheeling a barrow full of sand over to the kitchen garden, in order to make sandbags to place around the glasshouses. Brown was striking his forehead in frustration and my lad flinched and skittled sideways with the wheelbarrow.

“Idiot woman!” Brown growled. “She could have brought the whole house crashing down around our ears.”

“Anything the matter?” I enquired.

“My wife is a liability. Talk about the frailer sex!”

“If you could to make a start on the sandbags ...” I said to Jenkins, who was concentrating on taking up the smallest amount of space possible, systematically reducing his own volume by a fidgety series of tucks and squeezes. “What’s happened, Mr Brown?” I asked when we were alone.

“I was going to ask her to get some rich tea biscuits for me – she’s going into town later – and I only walked into the kitchen to find the inestimable woman, wearing her gas mask, on her hands and knees, with her head in the oven. For goodness’ sake! She said she was testing the mask out. She said she didn’t want to get caught out by the Hun. I said she could have blown us all to kingdom come. What if I’d been smoking my pipe when I came in?” He was lathered with it, as hot under the collar as I had ever seen him.

Parry the Paint organised a civil defence exercise for the whole of Morwithy and we were under strict instructions not to allow a single beam of light to slip between curtains or through doors. Perhaps the depth of darkness was too much for him.

We were on our way to bed when Mrs Brown came running into our cottage in her night clothes, screaming. She was clawing at her face with her fingers, with her nightdress whipping round her. “Help me, God!” She bent over double, clutching herself, clawing her face again, rocking her whole body.

We stood aghast, then in alarm Jenny ran upstairs to find Mrs Brown a dressing gown, as though that could protect her against unfolding tragedy. “Stay here,” I said, dashing out into the courtyard.

“The blackout!” Jenny shrilled. “Close the door!” but I could see that it wasn’t the blackout which was making her panic.

There was a darkness inside the dugout undiluted by the thready light from the stars overhead. I stood on the threshold, gripping the doorframe, trying to distinguish one looming shape from another – the shelving, the table, his armchair – and I could already detect the slippery, ferrous, salty smell of blood. I dragged the door shut behind me and snapped the light on.

A spurt of blood and matter glistened on the far wall. I was transfixed by the arrested violence of it, taking in the red spew thinning into rivulets, the pale cusp of a fragment of bone caught in the mortar of the whitewashed brickwork and I kept staring at the wall, not willing to look elsewhere, not willing to look.

He was sitting in the armchair all akimbo, as if the force of the blast had lifted him up and then dropped him, not very tidily, so that he was slumped over to one side. He had changed out of his overalls into what he used to call his civvies, and his shoes with their neatly tied double bows shone as though he had polished them shortly before he shot himself. It was the sight of his shoes that had the undoing of me. I started shaking my head, then found that I couldn’t stop. I stood with my hands clamped over my ears like Jenkins, trying to block everything out. From the corner of my eye I could see the Webley Mark One air pistol on the floor beside his chair and I inched my way towards it. I would have stooped to pick it up, but then I thought about the police and stopped in my tracks. Doctor? Coroner? Priest? Where do you turn when your friend has killed himself? Standing this close to him I could see the extent of the blood, scarlet and copious, thick as jelly, and I found that I was trembling. I noticed that his hand was crooked anyhow and I straightened it, then with a feeling of trepidation I took it in mine and it was still faintly warm, so I cradled it for the comfort thinking that I had known and not known that this might happen. Poor Mr Brown, damaged by the war and then imperfectly repaired, holding back the great tide until he couldn’t hold it back any longer. I thought about him doing the crossword and bowling beamers at me by the hour in the wildflower meadow; I thought about the dignified cuckold, the old soldier felled by the fire in the beech wood, the approximate driver, and for one absurd moment I opened my mouth to tell him how terrified I always was on those careering voyages in the back of the motor and caught off my guard I glanced at his face.

I have an image of my friend that effaces all my other memories of him. I have an image of my dear friend that I just cannot erase.

The police arrived and then an ambulance. It was an Austin 18 with two-tone livery – I found myself making a note of the fact the way Mr Brown would have done, taking refuge in detail in order to blind himself to what was happening. At some point Mrs Brown must have wrested herself free from Jenny’s care because there was a commotion at the entrance to the dugout and I could hear her sobbing, “I never thought … I never thought he actually – I mean, he said it sometimes, but I didn’t think –”

The recollection of her upending herself for Samuelson year after year and reading out her wretched recipes to all comers made me boil with anger. I had to restrain myself from elbowing through the surrounding throng and taking issue with her: “That’s because you never stopped to think. You never stopped –” I remembered the blistering arguments we used to hear over spilling from their cottage, Mr Brown shouting out his desperation so that she would hear it.

The police sergeant had come from Monmouth. He was a stocky fellow, tired at the end of a long shift, who seemed to be inured to the procedures involved and had doubtless seen too much over many years of service. He cleared his throat with a compassion that seemed a little weary. “You said you thought it was an accident, didn’t you?” he asked with emphasis.

Mrs Brown drew a breath to answer before I realised where the line of questioning might lead.

“Yes,” I did step forward then. “He cleaned the pistol regularly. It must have … gone off … by mistake.” I spoke as firmly as I could. Behind me in the dugout I could hear the circumspect tread of the medics and the burr of their movements. Somebody was taking photographs, turning Mr Brown’s dead body into an exhibit. I had to bite my lip to steady myself. “We were talking just the other day. He was full of plans – for the cricket next year, for lots of things. There’s no question –” I didn’t want him to be branded a criminal. I didn’t want him to be buried in unhallowed ground, by the crossroads in the village where the bodies of past suicides were supposed to lie, with no mark to show their resting place. I wanted everything right and proper for him, with hymns and blessings and prayers and respects paid and all the Christian consolations to speed him on his way. “I was a colleague of his,” I said, by way of explanation. There was a catch in my voice. Talking about him in the past tense filled me with a grinding sadness, terrible and familiar: the tectonic shift of grief which changes the world so that it is never quite the same again. “It was definitely an accident.”

They covered his body with a sheet once they had worked through the formalities and they drove him away in the ambulance. The doctor gave Mrs Brown a sedative and Jenny put her to bed in our spare room. At one point I glimpsed you speaking to the police sergeant. We were hampered by sorrow, all of us; moving uncertainly, gauging the weight of it. Some young constable was given the job of cleaning the blood from the dugout wall and I offered to help him – my own last rite – but he wouldn’t let me. I went home and Jenny made me a mug of hot milk and I sat, unhoused, staring at the surface of it until a skin formed, and she put her hand on my arm and said that she was sorry.

After work the next day, stumbling through the vineyard checking the grapes for ripeness, I went and sat in the dugout. The blood-soaked, varicose old armchair was in the corner of the kitchen garden waiting to be burned on the next bonfire, so I perched on my stool the way I always did, alert to traces of him in the air, with the sense that everything good had turned bad, that everything white had turned black, his presence, like a photographic negative, turned to absence.

I switched on the wireless, lowering the volume by degrees. Mr Chamberlain had just arrived home from Germany and was speaking from the foot of the aeroplane steps at the Heston aerodrome. He was carrying an agreement he had signed with Herr Hitler and promised us peace for our time.