Pat Barker - Double Vision

‘You stay in touch now.’

‘Next time I’m in London — I’ll give you a ring.’

Ian set off to his hotel. After a few yards, he turned and, walking backwards, called, ‘You couldn’t have saved him. He’d have gone whatever you said.’

Stephen raised his hand. ‘’Night, Ian.’

He walked slowly upstairs to the first floor, struggled to turn the key in the lock and then flopped down on the bed. He closed his eyes and saw the photograph of the young man exhumed from a mass grave in Kosovo. He’d been there when that was taken, pressing a handkerchief over his nose. Summer. Dusty trees. Chequered light and shade. They followed the smell up the valley, plagued by flies that zigzagged above the narrow path between the trees. Drunk on sweat and the smell of decay, one kept settling on his upper lip. Flies settled on the blindfolded man too, but he didn’t try to brush them away. Stephen watched a fly zoom into the gaping hole of his mouth.

You couldn’t have saved him.

Jerking awake, he realized the bedside lamp was still on, thought about getting up, undressing, pouring a glass of water, but couldn’t in the end be bothered to do any of those things.

Instead, he groped for the switch and turned off the light.

Over breakfast he read the article he’d written the day before. At the last moment Ted had rung to say they’d got a terrific photograph of Milosevic entering the tribunal, so could the story start with that? Reluctantly, he’d rewritten the first paragraph — with difficulty, since, like most people, he hadn’t seen Milosevic come in.

The photo — it had pride of place at the head of the page — showed the chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, laughing in triumph as the ex-dictator, a shadowy figure with bowed shoulders, was escorted to his seat.

Ted was right, it was a terrific photograph. A dramatic moment. Unfortunately, it had never happened. He’d been watching Carla del Ponte, her helmet of blonde hair gleaming under the lights, sharing a joke with the other prosecuting attorneys, wholly absorbed in that conversation. Not only had she not laughed in triumph at Milosevic’s downfall — she hadn’t even noticed him.

So much for photography as the guarantor of reality. It pissed him off. He kept telling himself it didn’t matter, but all the time he knew it did. Image before words every single time. And yet the images never explain anything and often, even unintentionally, mislead.

*

That afternoon, he played truant from the tribunal and went to the Mauritshuis, where he spent a long time in front of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring .

Enormous eyes, blackness all around her, a dazzle of pain and tears. She reminded him a little of Justine, and the time he spent with her did more than anything else to rinse his mind clean.

Back home, rattling his key in the lock — the front door was hard to open because the wood swelled in damp weather — he braced himself to face the dark and chilly cottage, no fire, no food in the fridge, and the manuscript, lying in wait for him on the table, which even after this short break seemed about as appetizing as a bowl of cold porridge.

Instead he opened the living-room door and saw a fire blazing in the grate and smelled food cooking. The whole room had been tidied up and cleaned. All he had to do was sit down by the fire, pour a glass of whisky, and wait for Justine to get back from the farmhouse.

And upstairs — he knew without going to look — there would be clean sheets and pillowcases and a vase with flowers on the table by the bed.

That first time had set the pattern for all their subsequent encounters. If it made sense to speak of practical orgasms, then that is what Justine had, and always they were followed by this sudden sharpening of her appetite. Sex never made Justine fancy grilled fish and steamed spinach, seasoned with lemon juice and freshly grated nutmeg. Oh, no, Justine’s taste was death-on-a-plate fry-ups, washed down by plenty of booze.

‘If you’re going to be a doctor, you’ll have to change the way you eat,’ he said sourly from the kitchen door. ‘And drink less.’

She looked up, flashing her sudden broad smile. ‘Ah, but I’m going to be a medical student first.’

He found the sex extraordinary, like nothing he’d ever experienced. Foreplay? he wanted to croak as Justine got her leg over for the second time that night. Or, What happened to romance? OK, he found the idea of quick, impersonal sex as exciting as the next man, but he didn’t want it in his own bedroom night after night with somebody he knew. Something had happened to Justine to make her both sexually uninhibited — there was nothing they didn’t do — and emotionally withdrawn. She still wouldn’t let him switch on the lamp, or even light a candle, so on cloudy nights they made love in pitch darkness. It began after a while to have an almost mythical quality, this prohibition against seeing her face, and it was her face that she was hiding. She joined him in the shower afterwards with no trace of embarrassment.

Sometimes, as on the first night, she spoke airily about ‘people’. People liked this, people didn’t like that, though he guessed, from various clues she let slip, that she’d had only one previous lover. Increasingly he was aware of this unknown man as an invisible third in their love-making, a secret sharer, his presence falling like a shadow on her skin.

Once or twice she talked about it, the affair she’d had last summer after A-levels, how shocked she’d been when the young man dumped her. No warning. She’d thought everything was all right, and then one evening he’d said, ‘I don’t think this is working.’ Her eyes filled with tears as she said it, and she rubbed her wet cheek on his shoulder. ‘Why do you think he thought that?’ Stephen asked. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think he ever meant it to be permanent. It was just for the summer.’

She gave no further details, but she returned to the subject again and again, and always, whenever she mentioned it, her eyes filled with tears.

There’s an old saying that a man is only as old as the woman he feels, but Justine made him feel ancient. He wanted to say, ‘Look, this time next year you’ll be in love with somebody else. You won’t be able to remember what you saw in him.’ And when you’re my age, he thought sadly, you won’t even remember who he was. He didn’t say any of that. Instead he watched her face, blind and groping through pain, and thought that all this so-called wisdom was useless, because it couldn’t be conveyed without sounding patronizing. And perhaps he was being patronizing. No, patronizing wasn’t the right word, he cared too much about her for that. Paternal, that was more like it.

They went to bed and made love, and for once he saw her, or part of her, the shadows of clouds dissolving and re-forming over her breasts. He groaned and clutched her hips, grinding her pelvis into his, throwing his head back and baring his teeth as he came.

Nope, paternal wasn’t the right word either.

*

After ten days of intensely hard work, bending over the computer until his eyes burned, Stephen began to find the cottage unbearably claustrophobic. The fact was that Justine had insinuated herself into his living space. Not his work space, but almost everywhere else. She rearranged objects, tidied up, washed up, vacuumed the carpets. He never protested, except once when he found her ironing his shirts and told her roughly to stop being a doormat.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, flushing. ‘Dad’s pretty helpless, and —’

‘I’m not.’

It might have been better if they’d gone out more, but she didn’t want to go out. If he suggested a meal in a restaurant, or a drink, she always referred to some parishioner of her father’s who was sure to be there. ‘So what?’ he felt like saying. She was single; he was, if not single, at least separated from his wife. It was nobody else’s business.