Pat Barker: Double Vision

Looking up like this made her go dizzy. The faces filled her whole field of vision, a horde of goblins. Alec came up behind her, and she was glad to hold on to him and close her eyes until the walls stopped spinning.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine. I just went a bit dizzy.’

‘Oh, you were looking at the Green Men?’

‘They’re supposed to be symbols of rebirth, but actually if you look at them they’re quite horrible.’

‘I think it’s part of the cult of the head. Did you know the Celts used to cut off the heads of their enemies and stuff the mouths with green leaves?’

‘No, I didn’t. Not particularly optimistic, then?’

‘Not if it was your head.’

She smiled. ‘I really only popped in to thank you for sending Peter Wingrave round.’

‘Oh, he came to see you?’

‘Yes, last night.’

‘And you took him on?’

‘My dear, I jumped at him. He’s there now, putting up scaffolding.’

‘That’s good. You’re looking a lot better, Kate.’

‘I feel better.’ They sat in the pew behind the hymn and prayer book stand. ‘Have you known him long?’

‘Quite a while. Seven years, something like that. But not continuously. He’s travelled around quite a bit.’ He seemed to be debating whether to say more. ‘He’s an interesting person. I think you’ll like him.’

‘Why gardening, though? I mean, he’s got a degree.’

‘Plenty of graduate gardeners, Kate.’

That wasn’t fair. She wasn’t being snobbish about gardeners, she was saying, Yes, but something’s not right, something doesn’t fit, and she felt Alec had understood that perfectly well and decided not to acknowledge it.

‘We were very happy with him,’ he said. ‘The parish council. If we can’t get any more sheep, we’d certainly use him again.’

‘That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. Second choice after the sheep?’

‘We don’t have to pay the sheep.’

‘Do you think you will get some more?’

Alec shook his head. ‘I just don’t know. You notice the farmers aren’t restocking?’

Kate remembered men in white decontamination suits chasing squealing sheep around the graveyard. They’d been sent to the pyre at Ravenscroft Farm. Kate had stood with Angela, whose precious boys had been destroyed in the same cull, on a hill not far away from the farm and watched the fire burn. Clouds of foul-smelling black smoke had obscured the setting sun. The pitiful legs of cows and sheep stuck up from the mound of corpses and rubber tyres. A stench of rotting flesh drifted towards them over the valley, scraps of burnt hair and skin whirled into the air. Kate put her arm around Angela’s shoulders and was trying to persuade her to leave, when a flake of singed cowhide landed on her lower lip, and she spat and clawed at her mouth to get the taste away.

Alec was staring at her. She realized she must have been silent for too long. ‘I was thinking about Angela’s boys.’

‘Oh, yes. Thomas, William, Rufus…’

‘And Harry.’

‘And Harry. I knew there was another.’

‘I wish she’d get herself some more.’

Alec raised his eyebrows. ‘You think she needs sheep?’

‘You can’t buy people.’

‘You don’t need to buy people.’

They were getting into one of those conversations that threatened to become pastoral, and as always Kate avoided going any further. ‘I’d better be going. Angela’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

The door creaked open, letting a shaft of sunlight fall across the stone floor, and Angela appeared. She blushed when she saw Alec, though she saw him at every service — Holy Communion, Matins, Evensong, she was never away. The three of them chatted for a while, then Kate thanked him again and watched him walk down the aisle, genuflect in front of the altar — a bit more of an effort these days, she noticed, he held on to a choir stall to lever himself up again — and stride off into the vestry.

Angela went ahead to get the car. She’d parked outside the chemist’s, she said, and that was too far for Kate to walk. Kate followed more slowly, testing the rubber tip of her stick on patches of ice. Alec hadn’t been particularly informative about Peter, but in a way she didn’t mind that. The closer Peter came to being simply a pair of hands, the better she’d be pleased.

At the gate she turned and looked across to Ben’s grave. The air was iron cold and still. She would never, never, never be able to accept his death, and she didn’t try. This wasn’t an illness she would recover from; it was an amputation she had to learn to live with. There was a great and surprising peace in acknowledging this.

She took a deep breath, wondering if she could possibly walk as far as the grave, but then Angela called her name, and she limped across the cattle grid and down the grass verge to the car.

On Stephen Sharkey’s last night in London he went to the leaving party he hadn’t wanted to have, and ended up getting thoroughly drunk.

He woke at five the next morning with a mouth like a dustbin, and had to ferret around with his tongue to work up some spit before he felt human enough to stagger into the bathroom. One look in the mirror said it all. Lids crusted, eyelashes matted, the whites of his eyes criss-crossed with red veins, a Martian landscape. Contact lenses left in. After several painful attempts he managed to get them out.

He forced himself through washing and shaving, made coffee, ate two slices of dry toast for breakfast, then started to pack. He had a busy morning ahead of him, seeing his solicitor, then his publisher, and he couldn’t possibly do either looking like this.

On his way to the first appointment he stopped at a chemist’s, bought eyedrops and selected one of the few pairs of sunglasses they had in the shop. He looked, he thought, peering at himself in the mirror above the display stand, like a soon-to-be divorced, almost middleaged man, sweaty, frightened, uncool and desperate to prove he could still pull. Which, he informed his reflection waspishly, is exactly what you are.

By two o’clock he was on the train to Newcastle. He slept intermittently, woke, watched the backs of other people’s houses rush past, then travelled two hours through a rain-sodden landscape. Ploughed fields with flooded furrows like striations of sky. Once they stopped in the middle of nowhere, and a herd of cows came trudging over to the fence and stared at the train, chewing, in a mist of their own breath.

At the station he lugged his cases on to the platform and stood with them, one on either side, like inverted commas, he thought, drawing attention to the possible invalidity of the statement they enclose. Invalid, or invalid, whichever way you cared to pronounce it, that was how he felt. A man who’d sacrificed his marriage to his career, and, now that the marriage was over, had turned his back on the career as well. Stop beating yourself up, he told himself, shifting from foot to foot, but it was hard not to. He felt anxious, but that was partly the drink. If this cottage turned out to be too claustrophobic — too close to Robert, in other words — he could easily find somewhere else to live. And he wasn’t going to starve. He had a network of contacts. If the book took longer than three months to write, he could keep himself going on freelance work.

No sign of Robert. Just as Stephen was thinking he’d have to find a phone — he’d forgotten to charge his mobile just as he’d forgotten to take his contact lenses out — he caught sight of him, threading his way across the crowded concourse with that hospital doctor’s disguised run of his.

Striding towards Stephen, Robert opened his arms. They embraced, awkwardly, their preconceptions of each other failing to accommodate the reality of muscle and bone.