Pat Barker - Double Vision

But Kate made the effort, and, sensing her mood, Alec suggested they should take their tea into his study.

Kate followed him down the corridor, wondering what the smell was. Some powerful floor cleaner that failed to live up to its promise and simply pushed the grime around from place to place. Though perhaps there was no grime. Perhaps it was just that the lino had reached a stage of wear when all the colours run into each other and become shades of grey. It reminded her of high teas with her great-aunts when she was a little girl. That graveyard smell of boiled beetroot leaking red on to wilted lettuce leaves.

Alec’s study was overshadowed by trees. He closed the door behind them and stood at an angle to the window, facing her. ‘I dream about them sometimes. The trees. I dream the branches come in at the window.’

Kate realized, with some surprise, that in over five years of so-called friendship this was the most intimate thing she’d ever heard him say. ‘You should cut them down.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that.’

‘They’re too close, Alec. Anything that’s been blocking the light for 200 years needs to come down.’

He sat down with a creak and protest of ancient wood. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Something rather strange happened last night.’

In telling the story again, she rediscovered her anger. She was flushed by the time she finished. ‘It’s thrown me completely. I was really frightened.’

Alec steepled his fingers, as if she had posed some abstract question in moral theology. ‘I wonder what made him do that? He does have problems with boundaries between people.’

Kate was getting angrier by the minute. She could have accepted any amount of Christian preaching — he was paid to do it, after all — but this was just psychobabble. And he hadn’t acknowledged the salient fact, which was that she was the injured party.

‘You mean, he can’t tell where he stops and other people start?’

‘He’s not dangerous.’

‘Alec, that is dangerous.’

‘I can see it must’ve been a terrible shock.’

She felt like giving him a few shocks of her own. ‘Why didn’t you tell me he’d been to prison?’

‘It didn’t seem relevant. He hasn’t been in trouble with the law for more than five years.’

‘I was the person to decide if it was relevant. It’s quite simple, Alec. If you want him in your house getting off with your daughter, that’s your business. But I have the right to decide who I want to trust. You should’ve warned me.’

‘Well,’ he said at last, after a long dragging pause.

‘It’s difficult.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Do?’

‘What did he do to get sent to prison?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘It wasn’t a sexual offence. I always specified I couldn’t take sex offenders because of Justine.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘What, then? Murder?’

She expected, hoped, that he’d laugh and accuse her of being melodramatic. Instead, he sighed. ‘I really can’t talk about this.’

And that was that. She could tell he wouldn’t budge.

‘I was alone with him, hour after hour, day after day, and you can’t say, “Well, so what? Nothing happened,” because last night something did happen.’

‘Did he threaten you?’

She was silent. ‘Alec, do you know what it is to be really frightened?’ She wasn’t explaining this well, because she didn’t understand it herself.

‘Are you going to tell the police?’

She stared at him. His glasses flashed in a glint of light that struggled through the leaves. ‘Why? Why is it so important for me not to tell them?’

‘It could be very serious for him.’ He started to speak, stopped and started again. ‘He hasn’t really done anything, has he?’

‘You mean he’s on parole?’

Alec looked down at his hands.

‘No, I won’t tell them.’ She looked at the carrier bag at her feet. ‘I’ve brought all his stuff. I haven’t got his address — I always paid in cash. And this’ — she held up the envelope on top — ‘is payment to the end of the month.’

‘What’s he done, Kate? Except get a bit obsessed?’

‘Mucked up the contents of my head. But I quite agree that’s not a crime. You see, I’m not being spiteful. I’m trying to understand, but I don’t understand, and I don’t think you do either. And it does seem to me that while you were dishing out the Christian charity, you might have spared a bit of it for me.’

‘Perhaps he’s in love with you, Kate. Have you thought of that?’

She shook her head vigorously, involving her shoulders, back and arms, like somebody trying to shake off an unpleasant insect. ‘No, I don’t think that’s it, at all.’

She was almost in tears. Alec reached out his hand, but she moved out of range. ‘Don’t bother getting up, Alec. I can see myself out.’

Stephen listened in silence to Kate’s account of her meeting with Alec. When she’d finished, he said, ‘You won’t weaken and take him back, will you?’

‘Good God, no.’

She looked so tired and lonely he wanted to hug her, but they weren’t on hugging terms, so he touched her gently on the arm and wished her luck.

When he told Justine about Peter’s midnight visit to the studio, she shrugged her shoulders and went back to chopping peppers.

‘Was that your impression? That he’s got problems dealing with boundaries between people?’

She thought for a moment. ‘It’s not the way he sees it. He thinks he’s got exceptional powers of empathy. And he hasn’t, of course. What he does is dump his own emotions on to the other person and then he empathizes with himself.’ She shrugged again, this time violently. ‘It’s a mess.’ She scooped up the chopped peppers and threw them into the pan.

He thought the conversation was over, but a second later she surprised him by laughing. ‘You know what his ambition is, apart from being a writer? To be a therapist. He thinks he’d be better at it than most of the ones he’s known.’

‘How many has he known?’

‘Oh, a few.’

‘He’s addicted to therapy?’

‘He’s addicted to giving therapists hell.’

‘Justine,’ he said, coming up behind her and putting his arms around her. ‘Do you know what he did?’

‘No. What does it matter anyway?’

‘You don’t think Kate had the right to know what she was dealing with?’

She turned to face him. ‘I don’t see the point of hounding people.’

‘No,’ he said, taking the plates from under the grill. ‘Neither do I. But I’ve got to do something about those stories. I’ve either got to send them back, or… I don’t know. Respond, anyway.’

Justine had promised Beth she’d take Adam to the fair, and persuaded Stephen to go with them. He’d agreed with reluctance, but found himself looking forward to it by the end of the week. He’d been working so hard cooped up in the cottage that he was starting to go stir-crazy.

They could hear the music while they were still half a mile away. Behind Stephen, as he braked and turned, the Sainsbury’s carrier bags, with their sober reminders of the routines of adult life, rocked and swayed, and one of them spilt its contents on to the floor.

‘Just leave it, Adam,’ Justine said, turning round. ‘We’ll sort it out when we get back.’

The moor was not far from the centre of town, but so big that on dark nights you could feel lost crossing it. Music thumped from loudspeakers stationed at every corner of the fairground. They seemed to wade through noise, lean into it. Young girls, faces blank in the yellow, green and purple lights, shouted and screamed, while gangs of youths stared after them, their bristly scalps slick with sweat. In the male guffawing, which both acknowledged and discounted the girls’ presence, there was a yelp of pain. The clammy night, the syrupy music oozing like sweat from every pore, the smell of beer on belched breath as another group of youths walked past, combined to produce a sexual tension that hung over everything as palpable as heat.