Pat Barker - Double Vision

He couldn’t believe his ears. ‘Slobbering?’

Another clatter of irreplaceable Georgian glass.

‘Justine. Leave the dishes. Hit me.’

‘Don’t tempt me.’

There was a tremor in her voice that he hoped was the beginning of laughter, but he wasn’t confident enough to presume on it. He was right.

At that moment they heard an embarrassed cough and turned to see Mark Callender hovering in the doorway, red-faced and awkward, with a tray of coffee cups in his hands.

‘WHAT DO YOU WANT?’ Justine roared.

It was blindingly obvious what he wanted, the poor sod.

‘I brought these.’

Stephen pointed to the table. ‘Just put them down there, will you?’

Mark retreated to the safety of the hall. ‘I think Mr Braithewaite’s leaving.’

‘Right,’ Justine said, pulling off her apron. ‘I’m out of here.’

Stephen tried to take her in his arms, but she pushed him away. ‘Don’t burn too many boats,’ he called after her.

‘You’re the one who’s done that. The whole bloody armada.’

Stephen hadn’t expected Justine to come to the cottage that evening, but she did, late, tear-stained and miserable.

‘Dad and Angela are getting married,’ she said.

‘Good,’ he said, after a second’s pause.

‘Good?’

‘It’s going to make it a lot easier for you to go away. You wouldn’t want to leave him on his own.’

‘No-o.’

Then the wails started. He hadn’t believed her capable of such uninhibited, childlike distress. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘Nobody loves me. ’

‘Your father loves you.’ A bit late, lamely and lacking all conviction, he added, ‘I love you.’

She uncovered her face, and gave him a sharp look. She wasn’t so far gone that insincerity didn’t penetrate. ‘You don’t have to say it.’ Suddenly, she stopped crying, and said briskly, ‘My mother didn’t love me.’

‘I’m sure she did.’ But he cringed as he said it, aware of the pointlessness of pronouncing on the feelings of a woman he’d never met.

‘Not enough to stick around. You know, it’s difficult to expect other people to treat you decently when…’

‘No, I know.’ The darkness at the uncurtained windows pressed in on them. ‘And Peter can’t have helped.’

‘No. So OK, he was bad news, and he would’ve been for anybody, I don’t think it was just me, but I fell for him. I can’t help thinking somebody else mightn’t have done, not in the same way. I clutched at it.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop beating yourself up. He’s attractive, he’s charming, he’s good-looking. If it came to a pulling contest, he’d do a helluva lot better than Mark.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Though apparently not as well as my brother.’

‘You’re jealous.’

‘Too bloody right I’m jealous.’

How could he have got his own brother so wrong. But he couldn’t sort that out now. ‘Look, getting back to Peter, in ten years’ time you’re going to believe you had a bloody good screw and dumped him. You dumped him . So just press fast-forward and start believing it now.’

She was lying in his arms on the bed, looking through the open curtains at the moon drifting between high towers of cloud.

‘It isn’t as easy as that. And in any case you don’t mean it, you know you don’t.’ She sniffed, wiping tears away on the back of her hand. ‘Dad liked you, by the way.’

‘I can’t think why. He must know I’m married.’

‘I haven’t told him.’

‘He knows.’

‘Well, I am nineteen —’

‘More to the point, Mark liked you .’

‘Yes, I know. He asked me to go out with him.’

‘Before or after you yelled at him?’

‘After.’

‘Kinky sod. Will you go?’

‘Do you think I should?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘I didn’t think he was all that attractive. Perhaps as a friend…’

‘If he’s a possible friend, you should go. Mind you, I’m not sure that’s what he wants.’

‘He’s just finished doing Medicine at Cambridge.’

‘Well, then.’

‘You’re supposed to be jealous.’

‘I’ve no right to be jealous. Have I?’

She didn’t answer. After a few seconds, she rolled over and, in a tense silence, they tried to get to sleep.

He woke the following morning knowing before he opened his eyes that something was wrong. Looking into the mirror as he shaved, his expression was not that conspiratorial self-acceptance he’d found so attractive in Goya’s self-portrait. Far from it. He craned his head back, guiding the razor underneath his chin, and he didn’t like anything he saw.

He made coffee and then took his toast into the living room to watch the television news. Israeli tanks bombarding Jenin. An old woman in a headscarf crying in the ruins of her home. Justine, who seemed to have lost her appetite for fry-ups, peeled and ate an orange.

When the news was over, she said, ‘Dad says you were asking questions about Peter before lunch. Why?’

‘I wanted to hear what he’d say.’

‘He says you kept asking what Peter did.’

He didn’t answer.

‘Whatever it was, he’s been out five years and he hasn’t done it again.’

‘How do you know, if you don’t know what it was?’

‘You don’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt, do you?’

‘Not often.’

‘The truth is, you’ve been digging around in violence so long you can’t see anything else.’

‘I see you.’

‘Do you?’

Stephen sighed. This was a surprisingly married conversation to be having with a girlfriend. It had that intense acrimonious pointlessness that only comes from long years of cohabitation.

‘Why do you do it?’

‘What?’

She jerked her head at the girl who was talking to camera. ‘That. Be a war correspondent.’

‘Foreign.’ The distinction mattered. He was damned if he was going to call himself after an activity he despised.

‘You covered a helluva lot of wars.’

‘They were there to be covered. I didn’t start them.’

‘You know there’s a Barbara Vine book called A Dark Adapted Eye ? That’s what you’ve got.’

‘Now you’re being silly.’

‘No, I’m not. People get into darkness, to the point where it’s the light that hurts.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Why did I do it? Adventure, proving myself, proving I could take it — and once that wore off, which it does, very quickly, being in the know. That sort of thing.’

She was looking at him scornfully.

‘Yeah, OK. I know — pathetic. But why do you think people become doctors? Pure altruism? I don’t think so.’

‘Why, then?’

‘Knowledge. Access to secrets. Power.’

‘Not the only reasons.’

‘There are plenty of good reasons for being a war correspondent. Witnessing. Giving people the raw material to make moral judgements.’

‘But you said yourself, the witness turns into an audience, and then you’re not witnessing any more, you’re disseminating.’

He’d forgotten he’d said that. ‘If you mean, “Was I damaged by it?” Yeah. I don’t think it’s inevitable, I can think of plenty of people who haven’t been, but, yeah, I think I was. Can it be repaired? Some of it. Probably not all of it, but that’s me —’ He turned to face her. ‘Imperfect, messed up, thoroughly unsatisfactory — and you’d better get used to it, sweetheart, because there’s a couple of million more of us out there.’

She stared directly into his eyes, the skin around her own eyes swollen from last night’s tears. ‘You’re getting tired of this, aren’t you?’