Pat Barker - Double Vision

She rattled about in the cutlery drawer and produced one.

‘That’ll do.’

He showed Adam how to tease out the small bones, skulls, feathers, fur and other indigestible parts of the owl’s nightly diet. Adam was totally absorbed. Stephen met Justine’s eye over the sleek, bowed head. She smiled and said, ‘You can come again. This is the quietest he’s been for weeks.’

Before long a neat row of skulls was lined up on the table.

‘Now you can wash them,’ Stephen said, starting to clear away the debris.

Adam ran off to the downstairs bathroom with his treasures in his cupped hands.

Stephen dusted off his hands and was about to go — he hadn’t intended to do more than deliver the pellets and retreat to the cottage — when Justine said, ‘Do you fancy a cup of tea?’

He fancied something a bit stronger than tea, but he could scarcely ask Beth’s au pair to raid the drinks cupboard. ‘Yeah, good idea.’ He was tired, he realized, sitting back in the chair, and He’d hardly spoken to anybody all week. ‘You nearly finished for the day?’ he asked, as she filled the kettle at the sink.

‘Just about.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘Beth’s always late back on Thursdays. There’s some sort of meeting after work, and it just seems to run on.’

How on earth had this bright girl ended up doing this? Over tea — Adam busy with his skulls at the other end of the table, snuffling through his mouth as kids do when they’re interested — she talked about her life, the job, how it was this or being a barmaid and Dad had thought this would be easier. There was no mention of her mother.

‘What does your mother think?’

‘God knows. Buggered off years ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’

A shrug. ‘No need, it was a long time ago. It was a great scandal at the time, you know? Vicar’s wife runs off. Not supposed to happen.’ She smiled. ‘You didn’t know I was a vicar’s daughter, did you?’

‘No.’ He wondered if she was a virgin. ‘Do you have to do anything?’

‘Do anything?’ She was amused. ‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Good works.’

‘No. Well, I don’t, anyway. No, I just keep lots of spiteful old cows supplied with gossip.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘I inherited that role from my mother.’

‘You could go off somewhere.’

Her face darkened. ‘It’s difficult.’

Deserted, possessive dad? ‘You’re going to stay here all year?’

‘No, well, don’t tell Beth, will you, because it’ll freak her out, but I think I might talk Dad into letting me go on one of those crash secretarial courses. And then I could get a proper job. You can’t get a job with just A-levels. Nobody wants to know.’

‘Sounds like a good idea. Where would you do it?’

‘London.’

‘Ah.’

He thought of Justine and her milkmaid cheeks in some office in Kensington tapping away on a keyboard thinking real life had started at last. Though he was the wrong one to criticize anybody for thinking real life was somewhere else — He’d devoted his whole working life to that particular delusion.

‘What’s this?’ Adam asked, holding up a skull with two long, orange-coloured teeth in the front.

‘A mouse,’ Stephen said.

‘How do you know it isn’t a shrew?’

He didn’t, of course.

‘You’ve got plenty of books,’ Justine said. ‘Why don’t you look it up?’

Stephen stood up to go. She came to the door with him, looking, he thought, prettier than she had the other night. He did find her attractive, though by now he was so frustrated he would have found almost any young woman attractive — and his definition of ‘young’ was becoming more generous by the day. But this one was too young, and much too close to home. If things went wrong — and how with a twenty-year difference in age could they not go wrong? — it could become very messy. And they wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing each other.

Thinking like this implied he stood a chance, whereas in fact she probably thought of him as even more decrepit than her father. At best as a nice, kind, avuncular figure helping to amuse Adam.

Not a pleasant thought.

He set off down the frosty path, raising his hand to wave to her as he reached the gate, feeling the withdrawal of warmth and light as a minor but real abandonment.

The phone was ringing as he opened the front door of the cottage, and he ran into the living room to pick it up. As soon as he heard Nerys’s voice, he caught the brown fug of his breath rising from a suddenly bilious stomach. Nerys sounded controlled and strident, spoiling for a row. She’d had an offer for the house, she said, and she thought they ought to accept it. The papers were full of a slowing down in the housing market, well, they’d been talking about that off and on for months, hadn’t they, but this time people did seem to think it was actually going to happen, so –

By ‘people’ he suspected she meant Roger. Roger-the-lodger, the sod. ‘How much?’

‘One and a half million. The estate agent says they’ve got the money. What do you think?’

‘Grab it.’

‘That’s what I thought. Well,’ she said breathlessly, ‘I’ll go ahead, then, shall I?’

‘Yes. And thanks, Nerys. I know you’ve had all the work.’

‘That’s all right.’ She managed to sound gracious and aggrieved at the same time. ‘Are you well?’

‘Yes, fine. And you?’

‘Fine.’

Somehow in a plethora of ‘fines’ they managed to get off the phone. It must be over, he thought, replacing the receiver, if they’d reverted to being polite.

He’d hardly put the receiver down, when the phone rang again. He jumped to answer it, superstitiously afraid it might be Nerys ringing to say the sale had fallen through, though if so it must’ve been the shortest negotiation in history — but it was Beth, sounding resentful, as she always did when asking a favour. She gave generously — she was always dashing about doing some good work or other, letting this, that or the other cause eat into her scanty free time — but she’d never learnt to ask or receive gracefully, so it was a slightly petulant-sounding Beth who explained that Justine’s car wouldn’t start, and she couldn’t stay over because it was her father’s birthday, and they were going out for supper, so could he possibly run her home? Beth would have done it herself, of course, but Adam was in the bath and couldn’t be left. Stephen cut her short, saying it was no bother at all and He’d be up to the house in a couple of minutes.

Fortunately, he hadn’t started drinking. One of his health ploys was to put it off till later and later in the evening.

Justine was waiting at the gate, Beth just visible at the crack in the front door. ‘Goodnight,’ they called to each other. ‘Have a nice evening,’ Beth added.

Stephen waved, but didn’t get out of the car.

As Justine settled into the passenger seat and pulled the seat belt across, he said, ‘I don’t know where you live.’

‘Hetton-on-the-Moor.’

‘No wiser.’

‘It’s the other side of the forest. Don’t worry, I’ll direct you.’

‘Is it far?’ He was wondering about the petrol.

‘Six miles.’

Not far, then, though distances were deceptive here. The country lanes wound round so much that estimated travelling times were apt to be too optimistic. And then there was the forest, with its single road, its mile after mile of impenetrable trees.

‘Is it anywhere near Woodland House?’

‘Kate Frobisher’s place? Yes, she lives a couple of miles outside the village.’

‘One of your father’s parishioners.’

‘Yeah, but not the God-bothering kind.’