Pat Barker - Double Vision

‘In spite of not knowing what he’d done?’

She shook her head. ‘Whatever it is, he’s served his sentence. You can’t hold things against somebody for ever.’

That depended on what they’d done, he thought. ‘You must have some idea.’

‘No.’

‘Drugs?’

‘He hates them.’

She was starting to defend him, the last thing Stephen wanted. ‘It sounds as if you’re well rid of him anyway.’

‘That’s exactly what Dad said.’

He was glad to know Christian charity hadn’t entirely stifled common sense. ‘Yeah, well, we’re the same generation.’

He looked at her again in her ridiculous baggy T-shirt and thought, I’ve got to stop patronizing her. All along he’d assumed she was suffering from nothing more than the pangs of disappointed calf love, as painful as a toddler’s temper tantrum and as difficult for an adult to take seriously. He’d never allowed for the possibility that she might have encountered, early in life, a man who would have been bad news for any woman at any age. Or man, perhaps, remembering certain nuances in his conversation with Peter.

Coldness, manipulation, a passion to control, an abnormality of mind that makes generosity in giving count against the giver…

He patted her ankle, then impulsively bent and buried his face in the golden hair between her legs, groping, flicking, sucking, nuzzling while his hands pressed her thighs gently apart. For a second her pelvis arched, like a flower in a dark corner angling to find the light, and her stomach muscles tensed and quivered.

But then, almost immediately, she was laughing and pulling away from him, pushing his head to one side as she wriggled free.

‘I’ve got to go home.’

He looked at his watch. ‘It’s not time.’

‘Beth says there’s a tree down on the forest road. I’ll have to go all the way round.’

She was looking down at him almost as if she were sorry for him.

‘Will I see you tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

More love-making in the dark. ‘Do you still love him?’

The pupils of her eyes were so large the blue eyes looked black. ‘I’m not sure I know what love is.’

‘The truth is you were too good for the little sod.’

She smiled and shrugged. ‘I’d better get dressed.’

‘You’re probably too good for me.’

She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. ‘Oh, you’re not so bad.’ A subterranean explosion of laughter shook her breasts. ‘You’ll do.’

For now, he thought, as he watched her dress.

Kate got back from the hospital on Monday afternoon, amazed at the improvement to her shoulder, but still drowsy from the anaesthetic. After making a few phone calls to tell people she was home, she stood at the window, pulling Ben’s amulet up and down the chain. It was some comfort, but no substitute for his arm around her shoulders.

She resisted the idea of going to sleep, and set off for a walk instead. She needed to clear her head, but also she wanted to enjoy the improvement in her mobility. She walked along, bending her head from side to side, circling her right arm. If anybody had seen her she’d have been locked up, but there was nobody to see. The weather was keeping everybody else indoors.

It had been blowing a gale all day. Even in the hospital she’d been aware of it, great blasts hurling rain against the window, though inside her cubicle there was only the heat of the radiator and mingled smells of antiseptic and rubber. Never mind, she was free of all that now. No more hospitals. No more surgical collar, and for the next two days at least — no Peter. She’d given him Monday and Tuesday off — paid, of course — partly because she hadn’t known how she’d feel after the operation, but also because she needed to spend some time alone with the Christ, to try to recapture her original conception.

Above the forest the clouds massed together, a huge black anvil obscured by veils of drifting grey. The trees heaved and thrashed, and then suddenly went quiet, only the topmost branches tweaking, like the tip of a cat’s tail while it’s watching a bird. And then the rain came, great slanting silver rods, disappearing into the black earth.

The deer would still be dry, she thought. She imagined them, moist nostrils quivering as the storm passed over their heads. Other animals were less lucky. In the fields cows huddled around their feeding trough in muddy trenches they’d dug for themselves; horses tilted a hind hoof and stood, blank with misery, water matting the coarse hair on their flanks; rabbits raced for cover, the wind making pale grey stars in their fur.

She ran the last few steps to the front door, struggling to keep her balance, and let herself into a house whose fading warmth told her at once that the fire was either dead or dying. She managed to rescue it, and sat down by the fire with a stiff whisky to warm her through. Outside in the yard dead leaves were blown about like specks on an ageing retina. The hens, affronted by the constant ruffling of their feathers, had retired to the barn, where they clucked peevishly on their brooding perches.

After a while, feeling fully restored by the walk, she got out her drawing pad and looked back to her original sketches for the Christ commission. They worried her because they had an energy that she knew the finished, or nearly finished, figure lacked. She spent a couple of hours working out what had gone wrong, increasingly convinced that something had and knowing there was very little time left to put it right. In the end she put the work aside in despair and went to the window, resisting the urge to go across to the studio and try out new ideas. It would be mad to work now. She was in no state to take decisions.

The sky had darkened. Trees strained and groaned in the yellow light. A flock of birds flew over, rooks, probably, flapping big, black, ungainly wings, but after that there was nothing. Feeling suddenly exhausted, as much by doubts about her work as by the anaesthetic, she switched off the lights and went early to bed.

She felt she would sleep at once, and did, only to wake again, half dreaming, thinking how the wind in the trees sounded like the sea. It was like being back in the lighthouse she and Ben had rented once, where one stormy day she’d forced the window open to find a seagull level with her face, its rapacious golden eyes glinting as it rode the wind. And that night she’d run her hands along Ben’s spine, feeling the knobs of his vertebrae as secret and mysterious as fossils.

‘Hey,’ he’d said, turning to face her. ‘I’m not clay.’

You are now, she thought. Oh, my love. At such moments, stranded between sleep and waking, the pain tore into her, as fierce as it had been the day she took the call. Sleep, she told herself, turning over and curling up. The only cure for this was sleep.

But the long fall from waking into sleep ended with a thump. She was sitting up in darkness, dry-mouthed, staring, knowing that some particular sound had dragged her back into consciousness. Not the spatter of rain on the glass, or the whistling of the wind — these were natural sounds and easily screened out. No, some specific, wrong sound — a sound that shouldn’t have been there at all — had woken her. She stared into the darkness, tense, waiting for it to be repeated.

Nothing. She settled back against the pillows, telling herself she couldn’t have heard anything unusual against the clamour of the storm, and that a noise in a dream can seem to come from the outside world if you wake suddenly. But she couldn’t get back to sleep. At last, she got out of bed, reached for her dressing-gown and looked out into the yard, through the buffeting of the wind that seemed, in some extraordinary way, to have become visible, bending the trees sideways, beating the bushes till they showed the white undersides of their leaves as if in fear. Light came and went in fitful gleams on the choppy surface of the puddles, and for one insane moment the eye of the moon stared up at her from the yard.