Pat Barker - Double Vision

‘Yes, in a few minutes. I just had to get the dust off.’

Stephen offered the whisky. Ben fetched glasses from the bathroom and held them as Stephen poured. They clinked silently, then turned again to face the screen.

Ben said, ‘Do you think the world just changed?’

‘I think America will.’

‘I think things have changed. I mean real change. That was designed to be a photo-opportunity, and what have I done? I’ve spent the whole bloody day photographing it. Along with everybody else. Because we can’t escape from the need for a visual record. The appetite for spectacle. And they’ve used that against us, just as they’ve used our own technology against us.’

‘So what are you saying? We shouldn’t cover it?’

‘I don’t know what I’m saying. But I know something happened here — and it isn’t just that the Americans found out that they’re vulnerable too.’

Stephen took a gulp of whisky. ‘I just rang Nerys.’

‘Oh, good. I haven’t managed to get Kate.’

‘She was in bed with another man.’

A pause. At last he looked away from the screen. ‘Oh, my God, Stephen, I am sorry.’

‘It’s nothing. You compare it with what’s happened to a lot of people today… Going to work this morning…’

‘Have another drink.’

He didn’t want another drink. What he wanted was to be outside his own skin, but there was no way of arranging that. He pressed his fingers deep into his flesh, round the jaw, under the cheekbones, into the sockets of his eyes, reminding himself of how it all fitted together. ‘No, I won’t, thanks. I’m going to take a couple of sleeping pills and blot it all out.’

Getting up to go, he saw the cameras on the table. ‘Did you get any good shots?’

Couldn’t remember what the answer had been, but knew it now anyway. Yes, he got some very good shots. He always did, right to the end, right up to the last shot that killed him. He missed Ben. More than he missed Nerys. Now that was a shock, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been. He’d shared more with Ben.

It snowed hard all day. By evening the ground was completely covered. After a bad start, Stephen worked till four o’clock and only then allowed himself to think about Justine. He felt she would come, though he almost managed to hope that she wouldn’t, but when, unnaturally alert, he heard the crunch of her feet, he had got to the door and opened it before she knocked.

‘Adam couldn’t come,’ she said, stamping her boots on the mat. ‘He’s got a temperature.’

Perhaps it was true. ‘Wouldn’t you rather wait till he’s better?’

She stared at him. ‘No, if he’s going to be off school, I need something to keep him busy.’

‘Then we might as well go straight away. There’s no point in getting warm just to get cold again.’ He put on his coat. ‘How’s the car?’

‘Fixed. Beth got the AA out. Well, it’s almost as big a disaster for her as it is for me. If I can’t get to work, she can’t go to work.’

He opened the back door. There, improbably large and veined, was the full moon, a cratered desolation hanging in space. The snow was unmarked except for the imprint of birds’ feet around the bird table. It levelled everything: even the garden pond was level with the lawn, its fringe of dead reeds casting blue shadows on the snow.

‘I’ll go first, shall I?’

Cautiously, he felt his way down the path, each step scuffing up a fringe of snow. Once he turned and looked back. Snow-light was reflected palely up into her face. She was looking down, choosing where to put her feet. The hawthorn hedge that divided the garden from the path was thick with snow. Brushing against it in his struggle to open the gate, he dislodged dollops of snow that landed on his head and shoulders. His breath was everywhere.

Side by side now, they set off across the field. It would have helped to talk, but he couldn’t think of anything to say, and anyway needed his breath for the climb. He didn’t want to be too obviously gasping for breath. The moon filled the sky, casting their shadows long and black against the snow. Once they were in the copse, he stopped and listened, but, apart from the creaking of the branches, there was no sound. ‘Up there,’ he said.

They found the tree, and groped about in the snow between its roots to find the pellets. She stuffed about a dozen into her pocket. ‘That’ll do.’

It was harder going down. Once she tripped and he put a hand out to steady her, but she moved away again as soon as she recovered her balance. They came out from between the trees and stopped for a moment, gazing down over the white fields. Suddenly she caught his arm. ‘Look,’ she said.

A barn owl, perhaps even the owl that owned this nest, was hunting, quartering the frozen fields, relentless in its precision. Nothing that lived and moved could hope to escape its beak and feathered claws. He pictured it eating, the obscene delicacy of the raised claw feeding a recalcitrant tail into its beak, huge golden eyes slowly blinking. Backwards and forwards, up and down. It was an illusion, probably, that he could feel the ripple of disturbed air across his face. At last it detected movement and stooped to the kill, scattering snow, huge wings flapping and beating the air as it struggled to lift off, something small and warm wriggling in its claws.

‘Isn’t it odd?’ Justine said. ‘You always feel lucky when you see something like that, and yet it’s bloody horrible, really.’

As they started to walk down the hill, he said, ‘Would you like a drink before you go? You must be frozen.’

‘In the cottage?’

‘Yes. Or we can go out. Whatever.’

She considered, the roundness of her cheek in the pale light making her seem momentarily no older than Adam. ‘In would be fine,’ she said, and smiled.

She surprised him. He’d been prepared for anything, even virginity. Instead there was a swift, almost soundless orgasm, followed by sharp fingernails clutching his buttocks and urging him on. And it took him a long time. The last thing he’d expected, after several weeks of celibacy, was to be left standing on the starting blocks with his running shorts around his ankles. Evidently she felt extra help was required, because at the last moment she shoved her forefinger hard into his anus. When he was at last able to speak, he said, ‘Bloody hell, woman.’

She looked up at him like an affronted kitten. ‘Some people like that.’

People? She was the vicar’s daughter, for Christ’s sake. They lay, side by side, watching snowflakes fumble at the pane. The room was full of moonlight reflected off the snow. She’d asked him not to turn the lamps on, and at the time he’d thought he understood her shyness. Now he wasn’t so sure. After a while, he started to laugh, deep convulsive laughs that banged the headboard against the wall.

‘What?’ she asked. ‘What?’

‘That was wonderful.’

Snow had been falling steadily for the last hour, muffling every sound other than that of their own breathing. He saw how the moonlight caught the whites of her eyes. Anchoring himself in the present, he concentrated on the briny smell of her on his fingertips, closing his eyes.

Abruptly, in a single powerful movement, she launched herself off the bed, pulled on her T-shirt and raced downstairs.

Following her, a few minutes later, feeling sticky, drained, spindle-shanked and middle aged, he found her in the kitchen, frying bacon and eggs.

‘I’m famished,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you?’

During the first few weeks of their working together Peter seemed simply bored. He turned up on time, fetched, carried, lifted, mixed plaster, held buckets, cut cloth and, when not required, retreated to the corner of the room, between the plaster figures, so that often Kate would forget he was there, and then be startled when something moved on the periphery of her vision.