Pat Barker - Double Vision

‘You’ve been ill, remember.’

‘Yeah, but I’m all right now.’

‘What you need is a few new experiences.’

‘Yes.’ She sounded amused.

A slight tension returned when he stopped the car on the road outside the vicarage, a tall, narrow, Georgian house with gables set back from the village green behind a copse of trees. He walked round to open the door for her.

Standing together in the sudden cold, they looked at each other directly for the first time. The moonlight caught the whites of her eyes. Something stirred in him, something nameless and irrational and a lot less healthy than lust. He smelled the stairwell in Sarajevo, and dragged cold air into his lungs. Her mouth was slightly open.

‘Yes, well,’ he said, taking a step back.

‘See you.’

She raised her hand, and walked rapidly away up the path. The front door released a sliver of golden light on to the trampled snow, and then she was gone.

Stephen woke next morning to find the excitement of the previous evening vanished and replaced by depression. He’d made a fool of himself. The worst of it was he was still attracted to her, but there was nothing he could do about it. She could come or not as she chose. He certainly wasn’t going to pursue her.

The sense of new possibilities beginning to open up had disappeared. At nine, long after he should have started work, he was still slumped in an armchair, brooding over the failure of his marriage.

11 September 2001. Not a date anybody was likely to forget and many people had far worse personal reasons for remembering it than he had. On that day, having any kind of personal crisis seemed selfish, and yet of course they happened. People fell in love, or out of love, or down flights of badly lit stairs, got jobs, lost jobs, had heart attacks and babies, stared at the shadow on an X-ray, or the second blue line on a pregnancy-testing kit.

When he closed his eyes, Stephen’s brain filled with images of shocked people covered in plaster dust. Grey dust blocking his nostrils, caking his eyelids. Gritty on the floor of the hotel lobby, trampled up the stairs and along the corridor to his room, where the television screen domesticated the roar and tumult, the dust, the debris, the cries, the thud of bodies hitting the ground, reduced all this to silent images, played and replayed, and played again in a vain attempt to make the day’s events credible: the visual equivalent of what you heard repetitively on the street: Christ, Holy shit, Oh my God.

Sometime after midnight, too fuddled with tiredness and drink to remember the time difference, he phoned Nerys. The phone rang perhaps twenty times. Running his tongue round his mouth, he found pieces of grit lodged between his teeth, though He’d just finished brushing them. He sat on the bed, watching the second plane strike, and hoped his voice would sound normal. She came on the phone yawning. ‘Nerys, it’s me.’ When there was no reply, he went on, ‘I was just wondering how you are.’

‘Stephen, I tried to ring. I couldn’t get through.’

‘No, the lines were jammed.’

Silence. He imagined her breasts in the moonlight, not as firm as they’d once been, but beautiful still. So many years of late-night calls from hotel bedrooms, and somehow in the process she’d detached herself. He didn’t blame her. He closed his eyes and for a moment almost drifted off himself, but then the remembered thud of a body hitting the ground jolted him awake. To shut the sound out, he focused on her breasts and was rewarded by a stir of lust. Sometimes when you’re so saturated in death that you can’t soak up any more, only sex helps.

‘Were you anywhere near?’

‘Yes. I got quite close, then we were told to get back.’ He was afraid she might be drifting off to sleep. ‘Nerys? I’ve been thinking.’

‘Yes?’

Something in her voice, patient, school-mistressy, exasperated, deflated him. He was trying to remember how it had been when they were first married, how one night while he was painting a door in their first home she’d come up and put her arms around him from behind, rubbing his cock against the palm of her hand while her breath exploded between his shoulder blades in sharp hot bursts. ‘I can’t wait till bedtime,’ she’d said. ‘Come to bed now.’ And how once in grey, early-morning light, randy, waiting impatiently for her to wake, He’d slipped inside her, guilty, forcing himself not to move, but then miraculously she’d arched her back and giggled and let him in more deeply, and He’d realized she was only pretending to be asleep. They’d been so passionate then, insatiable. He’d wake up in the mornings, feeling the imprints of her hands all over his body, already hard and wanting her, even before he was fully conscious. ‘Perhaps we could go back to Suffolk sometime?’ Their first weekend together had been spent in Suffolk, on the coast at Shingle Street.

‘Did you ring me up to say that?’

‘I was just thinking.’ What He’d meant was not, ‘Can we go back to Suffolk?’ but ‘Can we go back?’

‘I expect it’s changed,’ she said. ‘Shingle Street. It’ll have been ruined by now.’

A sound in the background.

‘Are you in bed?’

‘Of course I’m in bed.’

‘I thought I heard somebody.’

‘Well, you didn’t.’

He had to believe her. But then he thought, There’s the man who does the garden, the man who does odd jobs around the house, the man who does repair work on the car, the man who helps her with the VAT — ‘I’m thinking of packing this in.’

‘What?’

‘This.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded disconcerted, though she’d been on at him to get a desk job in London for years. ‘You say that, but you don’t really mean it.’

‘Actually I think I do mean it — this time.’

‘How much have you had to drink?’

‘A few.’

‘Say it again when you’re sober and I’ll believe you.’

If this went on, they were going to quarrel. ‘OK. Anyway, I’m sorry I woke you up.’

And then, just as he was about to put the phone down, he heard a man’s voice, drowsy, bad-tempered, too fuddled with sleep to be cautious, say, ‘Who the fuck is it?’

Nerys said quickly, ‘I just switched on the World Service, darling. I think it might help me get back to sleep. Bye!’

The phone went dead. Stephen lay back against the pillows, thinking, Christ. Oh my God. And then, almost simultaneously, he thought, Yes . He’d known for a long time that something was going on. Nerys hadn’t been the same for, oh… months, years probably, only it had suited him to look the other way. His mind groped in darkness. One phone call, and everything changed. But then he thought, Nothing’s changed. They’d probably been sleeping together every night He’d been away. For years perhaps. The only thing that had changed was his awareness of the situation.

Resigned to a sleepless night, he got up, put on a scratchy, over-washed towelling robe and took himself and a bottle of whisky along the corridor to Ben’s room. Thick carpets, twice-breathed air. Only the puddle of grey footprints outside Ben’s door seemed real. He knocked, bracing himself for disappointment.

‘Come in.’

Ben was still dressed, watching television in the darkness, a bluish light from the screen reflected on to his face. He pressed Mute as Stephen came into the room, and turned on the lamp beside his chair. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair damp. Like Stephen, He’d showered off most of the dust. His cameras were on a table by the window. ‘I can’t stop watching it.’

‘No, nor me. Ridiculous, isn’t it? When it’s out there.’ He sat down. ‘Are you going back out?’