The Road Between Us (41 page)

When he doesn’t find Hannah under the ivy-covered bough of the tree they used as cricket stumps, he continues walking, listening to the dried-out stag’s horn lichens crunch under his feet as he follows the worn path that leads to the Roman bridge. Here, in the honeyed afternoon light, he stands and contemplates the reeds that fringe the riverbank. They seem to be shimmering in a haze of heat, and a sheen, like white satin, seems to be lying over the idly flowing water. As his gaze follows the jerky puppet movements of two monarch butterflies in flight, he fancies he sees flecks of amber, but cannot be certain. Are they male and female? As they perform a hovering tarantella, they seem as weightless as paper, their wings rising and falling so quickly they look like orbs of mist. He takes a
deep breath and exhales slowly. Where is Hannah? He wants to share this with her.

He strolls on a few yards and sees her on the other side of the river, unaware of him. She is wearing the sarong and it seems to melt around her as she walks. When she slips it off, he sees she is wearing a bikini underneath. He feels mesmerized by her loose and careless beauty and realizes, with a jolt of guilt, that her body is proving a source of aesthetic pleasure to him. It is to do with her narrow waist and wider hips, the inflection where the pelvic crests meet the upper abdomen to form two opposing triangles.

She runs towards the river and, as she dives, the golden light in the garden seems to waver and roll across the surface of the water.

He walks on, feeling excited and charged. When he reaches the bridge, the blue, electric bolt of a kingfisher in his peripheral vision interrupts his thoughts. He watches it pierce the river.

Blue? He takes off his sunglasses and looks up. Is his colour vision returning? No. The cloudless sky is still grey. He stands still, closes his eyes and breathes deeply again. The air is heavy with pollen, dandelion seeds, summer.

Something blue again. A blue smell. Is that lavender? Mint? Something clean and antiseptic. And now something yellow. Burnt mushroom? A hint of mown hay? The smells are weaving a gauze of colour around him and it feels like being in love.

He takes another breath as deep as his lungs will allow and holds it in until he sees blotches. Then he exhales.

I am alive, he thinks. I am here.

There is something about this garden, its delightful corrupting power over him, that makes him feel more awake than he has ever felt before, more in contact with the world. He continues walking and finds himself deep within its tangled heart, trailing his fingers through the long pampas grass as if each stem is a string on a harp.

As he walks he wonders how long they have been here. He is no longer sure. A couple of days? Three or four? The flowers no longer seem tight in their buds. He has reached the fruit cage. Here he leans forward so that the nearest raspberry is no more than a few
inches from his eyes. Each of its drupelets seems to be bursting out of its satiny skin, eager to spill its pulp. Yesterday the raspberry was a little too hard. Tomorrow it will loose its elasticity. But today it is poised and tender and a powdery sheen is giving it a gradation of tone, the deeper colour roiling below the pale surface. He watches as his hand rises and plucks the berry, careful not to bruise it, and, as he examines the delicate hollow where the white bud of its stem had been, he feels his gums tingle in anticipation.

Relaxing his eyes as if contemplating a pointillist canvas, he notices a blurred pattern behind the raspberries. He adjusts his focal length again and sees that on a mound about fifteen yards away, Hannah is lying on the sarong, sunbathing topless, her head resting on her arm, her back half turned to him.

As he approaches her he sees the bottle of suncream has tipped over. The cap is open and the liquid glooping out on to the rug is attracting a mosquito. Next to this is her mobile and the paperback she is a quarter of the way through, lying face down, its spine broken.

He is about eight yards away from her now and, realizing that she is asleep, he stops so as not to disturb her. As he traces with his eyes the curving ridge of her backbone, the dip of her waist and the swell of her hip, he feels dizzy and short of breath, as if the sight is straining his heart and making him ill with her.

A light gust passes over them, and Edward marvels at the fleeting, goosebumped roughness of her skin. There is something else he notices for the first time: there are downy hairs where the sun catches the backs of her legs, and, above these, two dimples on the low parabola of her back. Another genetic signature.

‘She looks just like you,’ he says under his breath.

Hannah stirs and rolls over on to her other side, so that she is now facing him, but with her eyes still closed. She murmurs, a fragment of conversation rising up from a dream. There are tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead. As he notices that her hairline forms the top of a heart, his vision blurs momentarily, a blur of tenderness against which reason can find no grip. His blood is singing.

She is shifting to get comfortable now, tucking her knees up into a foetal position, laying one arm the length of her flank, following its contours. The palm of her other hand is near her face, warming in the sun. He can make out the pale pink hue of her skin.

Pink. The word has traction. Edward is seeing in colour properly now. Hannah’s lips are pale pink too. Realizing that he can also see the barley colour of his daughter’s hair, Edward blinks and looks down at his hands. They are still grey. He glances around the garden. Everything else is still in shades of black and white. His gaze returns to Hannah, and there it is again. The pink pigmentation of her skin, the pale gold of her hair. It seems miraculous. She is shimmering with colour.

He feels a swollen, tingling sensation in his belly now and a sweet, euphoric chill at the back of his neck. He is inhabiting the limbic region of his brain, the melting edges of his sanity. Signals travelling up his spine connect with nerve fibres. Involuntary muscle contractions in his lower pelvis release peptide hormones. With puzzlement, then horror, he realizes he has an erection, his first in years. Shocked by the mechanical fact of it, the lack of ambiguity it represents, he makes a guttural noise. Hannah must hear it because she sits up and stares evenly at him, an arm covering herself.

‘Do you mind?’ she says. It takes him a moment to realize this is not an accusation but a genuine question. She must realize the ambiguity, too, because, to make her meaning clearer, she adds: ‘I didn’t think anyone would see me here.’

For a moment Edward is incapable of speech, then he says: ‘The gardeners.’

Hannah looks around and reaches for her bikini top but does not rush to put it on, making fussy adjustments instead.

Edward finds himself willing her hands to move more slowly, to give his eyes more time.

‘It was the garden,’ he says.

‘What was?’

Has his feverish face betrayed him, he wonders? Has she seen the
hunger in his eyes and heard the animal howl below the calm timbre of his voice? Still on his feet, he sways slightly, feeling too light-headed and off centre to walk away.

When Hannah returns to the house, drying her hair after another plunge in the river, she hovers at the entrance to the kitchen. Her father is sitting at the table. His eyes are downcast and he has not noticed her. Scratching at a mosquito bite on her arm, she studies him as she tries to work out what just happened in the garden by the fruit cage. He had worn an expression she had never seen on him before.

Becoming aware of her presence, he raises his head and says:‘She looked so like you.’

Hannah averts her eyes, smiling tightly, holding back a careless remark. ‘Who did?’ she says eventually, looking over at him again. ‘Who were you talking to?’

Edward does not answer but instead places his hands flat on the table, as if trying to steady himself on a tilting sea.

‘Do you fancy a game of chess?’ she asks. ‘Uncle Niall taught me to play.’

He looks confused for a moment, then says, ‘Why do you call him Uncle Niall?’

‘That’s what Mummy used to call him, for my benefit.’ She thinks about this. Folds her arms. ‘I think she just thought it would make things seem more normal for me.’

They set up the chessboard on the terrace, the pieces casting shadows that lengthen as the sun sets. Hannah is about to check using a rook and knight combination when she hesitates. ‘Can you hear that?’

‘What?’

‘That humming sound … Look.’ She points at a hummingbird beating the air as it dips its needle-fine beak into a hanging blossom. She creeps on the tips of her toes around to Edward’s side of the table so that she can see it better. ‘Wow. I’ve never seen one before.’ Without taking her eyes off the bird she perches on
his knee, realizing too late that her bikini bottom is still damp.

Her quiddity, the soft heft of her, seems to catch him by surprise. Sensing his tension, she turns her gaze from the hummingbird. Their eyes meet for a beat too long and something seems to pass between them, a pulse that signals a new and deeper intimacy.

When he moves a hand up and down her back, she shivers and rolls her shoulders. As he begins to knead them, she says: ‘That’s nice. Keep doing that.’ She can feel the pentameter of his heartbeat, pitching through his whole body like tiny electrical shocks.
Lub-dub, lub-dub
. ‘You OK?’ she asks.

He covers his eyes with the back of his hand, so that they no longer have to meet hers. ‘Stop me,’ he whispers. ‘Please stop me.’

V

IN HIS ROOM IN THE NURSING HOME, CHARLES STARES AT THE
newspaper cutting in his old and desiccated hand. It is a grainy picture of a bearded man looking up from a hole. Who is he? He blinks. The caption reads:‘Hostage Edward Northcote’. Northcote? That name sounds familiar. Charles puts his Beatles record on and, as he sits down again, feels an unbearable pressure on his lungs. Several tons bearing down on him.

Now he is on his back on the floor staring at the ceiling and George Harrison is singing about being the taxman.

Charles cannot feel his arms or his legs any more. Before his eyes, motes of dust are churning lazily in the sunlight. It is turning cloudy inside. What is happening? He has a clear notion that Anselm must be told of this. He will be at home worrying about him.

On the edge of consciousness, Charles pictures that gentle face looking down at him as he pillows his head on his lap. They are young men again, twenty and twenty-two, in the hotel overlooking Piccadilly Circus. Anselm is giving one of his slow, knowing grins.

In these final moments of his life, Charles realizes how much he loves his friend; how much he wants to hold his hand, kiss the parting in his hair, touch his brow with the tips of his fingers. Anselm. His crime, his need, his dying thought.

VI

BY THE TIME THEY GO TO BED, THE TEMPERATURE IN ALSACE IS
rising again. Edward, his mind full of Hannah, is too hot to sleep. Even the walls seem to be sweating, as if in fever. Though he has opened his bedroom window, no air is circulating, and, as he lies awake staring into the semi-darkness, he considers running his bed-sheet under the shower so that it will be cool and damp against his skin.

Hearing his daughter pacing in the room next to his, he sits up and stares at the handle of the adjoining door, willing it to move, dreading that it might. As he listens to her uneven footfalls, his eyes follow the noise of creaking floorboards, back and forth.

His throat is dry now, his fists clenched against his longing, but this leaves him feeling not stronger but weaker, as if his muscles are fatigued from a long fight. In the moonlight he sees his skin is glistening.

He crosses the room with a heavy-footed walk and, picking up his swimming trunks and a towel, opens the main door. He goes down the stairs barefoot and heads out into the garden. The air is cooler here and as he lowers himself into the river he finds the water affords him some relief. There is a raw, loamy, rotting smell of vegetation coming from the reeds along the bank. Below him his feet are sinking into the velvety silt of the riverbed and, when he lifts them to regain his footing, clouds of mud rise to the surface,
swirling hypnotically. He can now feel weeds tangling and slithering around his feet, like eels trying to pull him down into the depths. He is motionless. An immense silence follows, as empty as space, as if all nature senses he is afraid to move.

By the time he returns to the bedroom, he is feeling feverish again. As he lies on his bed he pictures Hannah lying on hers. The temperature rises once more and, as if in self-accusation, his priapic state returns.

Ten minutes pass before he hears the door handle being tested. He listens as Hannah crosses her room, opens her main door and treads lightly along the hall until she comes to his. This time the door opens with tiny complaints of unoiled hinges against wood. It is followed by the feathery sound of a hand feeling its way along the wall. When Hannah’s features ghost out of the shadows, he can see she is blinking slowly, hardly stirring the air around her. He notices again the way her hairline dips in the centre of her brow; how her face seems to form a perfect heart.

With a crackle of static she slides under the sheet and lies on her back, arms by her sides. Edward is in the same position and is trying to control the sound of his breathing. As he holds his breath he realizes his daughter is doing the same. It merely draws attention to the slight rocking of the mattress underneath them. He cannot move, paralysed with tenderness.

‘Couldn’t sleep again,’ she whispers.

‘I don’t know how to stop this,’ he whispers back.

She lights up a cigarette, its burning tip a single orange eye in the dark.

‘I love you,’ he says, and the shadows around him seem to absorb the words so quickly there is doubt that they have even left his mouth. She takes a drag, and then she exhales loudly, the smoke pluming, pushing the words away.

When he finally summons the will to sit up, blotches appear before his eyes. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and walks unsteadily towards the door. Supporting himself with his hand against the wall, he descends the stairs. When he passes the
barometer in the kitchen he sees it is dropping and, as a gritty breeze begins to stir the shutters outside, he wonders if the sirocco reaches this far north. A windchime that has been silent for their stay now ripples.