Pat Barker - Double Vision

‘You know we needn’t go back,’ he said after a while. He had nothing on till Friday, when he was having lunch with Kate and taking Adam to the Bird of Prey Centre after school. ‘I could ask if they’ve got a room.’

‘All right. Yes,’ she said, downing the last of her whisky. ‘Good idea.’

They had a double room. He checked in, then went to get their stuff from the car. Not that they had much, except coats and spare sweaters. They went up to the room together, and while the landlady chattered on, Justine sat on the bed, testing it. It was a big, old-fashioned bed with head and foot boards, creaky springs and goose-down pillows piled high.

Their windows overlooked the harbour, where a dozen or more small boats rode at anchor, their rigging producing a constant clicking and thrumming. A disturbing noise. It was the sound he’d heard when he’d found the half-submerged boat, and perhaps that was why he associated it with fear. But he was anxious — as he had not been anxious on the first night they’d spent together. Justine sat on the window-seat, looking down on the boats. Stephen rested a hand on the nape of her neck and then, afraid the gesture might feel too proprietorial, stepped back and caught the tail end of a smile on her lips.

‘Do you feel hungry?’ he asked.

‘Not really. I think I’d like to go for a walk first.’

‘OK. It’s not raining?’

‘No, look at the water.’

Stephen moved away. Justine turned to look at him, her eyes that sullied, bewildered blue that moved him so deeply. They stared at each other, aware of the bed waiting for them, tempted. But he didn’t want to do that, he wanted there to be a long, slow careful approach. In a way, courtship, though it was an odd word to use when they’d been sleeping together for months.

They walked for miles along the beach, buffeted by the wind that blew the last vestiges of mist away. The waves roared up the sand, spread out in great arcs of foaming lace, then withdrew quietly, with a long slow dragging sigh. They played at being chased by the waves, and once, overconfident, he did get caught and splashed out with his trousers soaked to the knee. Like children, he thought, the pair of them, but with something that was not childlike there as a constant undertow, pulling them towards the moment of fulfilment in that bed. Sex was in every glance, every shout of laughter, but only once, struggling up the sand dunes to where they’d left the car, did they hold hands.

The bar was full of locals when they got back, and under cover of the noise they talked, leaning back into the high settle by the fire. The whisky winked and glinted in his glass, and the heat from the flames made his lips feel big and bloated, fish lips. Stop drinking, he told himself. Then suddenly the bar started to empty, and they were alone with each other and the fire.

Justine was feeling along her right cheekbone.

‘Is it still sore?’

‘Only when I press it.’ She forced a smile. ‘I think you’re very brave, going round with me at the moment. Everybody’s probably looking at you and thinking, what a bastard.’

‘Bloody stupid woman, keeps walking into doors.’

But it wasn’t funny. After a while she said, ‘It was a steep learning curve. When Dad was letting out our flat to the Fresh Start Initiative, quite a few of the people who stayed in it were battered wives who’d finally managed to get away, sometimes after years and years of abuse, and I used to look at them and think, You’re young, you’re healthy, you can earn your own living, why the bloody hell did you put up with that for years? But as soon as it happens to you, you realize how easy it is to be cowed. The shock. It’s almost like an animal, a mouse or something, playing dead.’

‘Playing dead isn’t a bad strategy if you’re not strong enough to fight back. Physically.’

‘I’m disgusted with myself.’

‘You shouldn’t be. You did the right things.’

‘I thought I was a fighter.’

‘You can’t fight two great big beefy blokes.’

‘But they weren’t. Big beefy blokes.’

‘They were stronger than you .’

What is it about her? he thought, as she continued to stare into the fire. Some quality in her that he didn’t think he’d ever encountered before, and was almost unable to name. The word that kept coming to mind was ‘gallant’, an old-fashioned word even applied to men, and it had never, even in its heyday, been applied to women. And yet that was the word, or as close as he could get. ‘Come on,’ he said, standing up. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

Kate had kept herself busy all afternoon with jobs around the house, but all the while the figure went on changing inside her head. She daren’t let herself think directly about it, and so ended up by splashing corrosive cleaning fluids around the inside of the oven with such abandon she was left with thin red burn lines above the rubber gloves.

Housework was much more reliably satisfying than art, she thought, wiping her hand across her forehead as she finished. Scrub these surfaces long and hard enough and you could scarcely avoid ending up with a clean kitchen. Break your neck on the risen Christ, and there’s no guarantee you’ll be left with anything except a broken neck.

Daren’t drink. Daren’t phone anybody. It would be disastrous to talk about it now and impossible not to. The answering machine clicked and whirred, but she shut the door on the voices.

Then, at the last possible moment, she went across to the studio, locking the house door carefully behind her as, only two days ago, she might not have bothered to do — and let herself into the studio.

Moonlight. A white floor. The white silent figure pinning down its own shadow. She stood in front of the plinth. The figure seemed different, though really it was her way of seeing it that had changed. Partly because of Peter. Because somebody else had seen it. The resemblance to a fish, or a pupa starting to hatch, was still there, but no longer dominated. He was a man now. All this time he’d been alone with the clouds and the moonlight and the shadows forming and dissolving on the floor, and in that time he’d become a thing apart. There was a life here now that no longer depended on her.

For a long time they stood and stared at each other. Well, there you are. She framed the words silently in her mind, dropping each one into a deep well. Finished.

Then she bobbed her head and slipped out quickly into a night of stars and shadows.

The load fell from her shoulders as she walked across the yard and let herself into the house. Who could she tell? Nobody — it was too late to ring anybody now.

She went into the living room to find Ben, though it was not Ben, only a thing made of bronze.

Better, really, to remember him as he’d been that first weekend they spent together in Northumberland, when they went into Chillingham Church and found, around a corner, unexpectedly, Lord and Lady Grey lying together on their tomb, in a peace that five hundred years of turmoil had done nothing to disrupt. Unconsciously she felt for Ben’s amulet. Two couples, one flesh and blood, one alabaster. Now only one couple left. She pressed her lips to the cold bronze of Ben’s forehead and went slowly upstairs to bed.

Moonlight shining in through the uncurtained windows lit up the high white bed. The wind and tide were rising, scouring the little town as if it were a barnacle they were trying to scrape off a rock. Stephen opened the window and streams of cold air passed over his face and chest. The thrumming of rigging against the masts had become a frenzy.

‘I hope we’ll be able to sleep,’ he said.

‘Oh? I was rather hoping we wouldn’t.’

She’d come out of the bathroom, naked, and was standing beside the plump bed. He started pulling off his clothes. She pulled back the bedspread and slipped between the sheets, where she lay watching him, her pupils so dilated that her eyes looked black.