Pat Barker: Double Vision

Robert held him at arm’s length, wincing and throwing his head back — a comment on the sunglasses.

Stephen took them off and ogled him.

‘Oh, my God, you look like a terrorist.’ He picked up one of the cases. ‘I’m parked just outside.’

Stephen followed him out of the station, head down into an icy wind that snatched the breath from his mouth. His trousers, too thin for the weather, flattened against his shins.

‘What you going to do for a car while you’re here?’ Robert asked, as he unlocked his own.

‘Buy one.’

‘Nerys got yours?’

‘Yup. To be fair she used it more than I did.’

Robert settled himself into the driving seat, hauling the belt across his chest. ‘How are you?’

‘Tired.’

‘Hung over.’

‘ And tired.’

Robert turned the heater on, and within a few seconds Stephen felt himself start to grow drowsy. Blinking hard, he opened the window and gulped the moist air.

‘So that’s it, then?’ Robert said.

‘Yeah, that’s it. Last assignment.’

‘And you actually mean it this time?’

‘I’ve handed in my resignation.’

‘Because last time —’

‘It’s the same as any other business, Robert. You get typecast. When I got back from Afghanistan, I said, Right, that’s it, finished. I don’t want to do it any more. And everybody said, Right, fine. No problem. And the next thing I knew I was being measured for another flak jacket.’

Robert was smiling. ‘You could’ve refused.’

‘Yeah, if I didn’t mind not working.’

‘And where’s the flak jacket now?’

‘I don’t know. On a peg somewhere.’

‘Waiting to be worn.’

‘ No .’ Stephen’s face felt numb as if he’d just come out of the dentist’s. He rubbed his cheeks and shivered inside the too-thin jacket. ‘How’s the family?’

‘Fine. Beth’s a lot happier now she’s got somebody reliable to look after Adam.’ He braked, drove slowly through a huge puddle, water curling up on either side of the car. ‘God help us if this lot freezes.’

Looking out over the sodden fields, Stephen was aware of winter in a way that he almost never was in London. There was a rhythmic squeal as the windscreen wipers swept to and fro, creating triangles on the mudspattered glass. Robert pulled out to overtake, and for a second the windscreen was blind, marbled with flung spray. Stephen made himself keep quiet, remembering how competitive they’d been as boys, how furious Robert had been when Stephen passed his driving test first time. Robert had managed it only at the second attempt.

‘So you’re definitely out of it?’

Why did everybody find it so hard to believe? ‘Yeah.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Fine. It’s the right time.’ Actually, he thought, not fine. More like an unshelled nut lying on the ground, any hope of future germination a lot less convincing than the prospect of being snuffled up by a passing pig. ‘Anyway, that’s enough about me and my problems. How are you?’

‘Fine.’

He hoped Robert’s ‘fines’ were a bit more honest than his, otherwise the whole bloody family was up the creek. But Robert was all right, of course he was. You only had to look at him — happiness and success oozing from every pore.

‘I’ve just applied for a research grant of three million pounds.’

‘What for?’

‘Possible treatments for Parkinson’s and dementia.’

When Stephen didn’t immediately reply, he added, with a slight edge, ‘I’m afraid my line of work’s a bit less glamorous than yours.’

Stephen was wondering if Robert had as many doubts about the coming weeks of proximity as he had himself. They’d never been close, even as boys, and since their mother’s death had met only at weddings and funerals. And yet, when he had rung Robert and told him his marriage was over and he needed somewhere to live, Robert offered the cottage, immediately, without hesitation. Shared genes, Robert would have said. The biological basis for altruism.

They were driving by the side of a lake, its water pockmarked by falling rain. A moorhen picked its way across the boggy ground and disappeared into the shadow of some willows whose bare branches overhung the water. Beyond the lake an immense dark stain of forest spread over the hillside. As they came closer, he could see that it was already dark beneath the trees, and would have been darkish even at noon. No life on the forest floor, or none that he could discern, though a sign warned of deer crossing. At intervals along the road there were small, crushed bundles of flesh and fur: rabbits, mainly, but here and there the gleaming iridescent plumage of a pheasant.

‘Carnage,’ Robert said. ‘The speed people drive through here. They’ve only got to hit a deer and it’d be the end of them.’

Robert’s house lay between the village and the forest. As they came out of the shadow of the trees, Stephen saw a grey stone farmhouse, appearing and disappearing with each bend in the road, fitting in so seamlessly with the surrounding fields that it scarcely seemed to have been made with human hands, but rather to have been thrown up by some natural process, like the granite boulders that littered the valley floor, left behind by a retreating glacier of the last Ice Age. Certainly it was less obviously a human artefact than the forest that crept over the hills towards it.

Robert turned up the drive and stopped in front of the house. Stephen got out, feeling surprisingly stiff, and stood awkwardly as his ten-year-old nephew, Adam, hurled himself over the threshold to hug his father. He didn’t seem to know when to stop, but simply crashed headlong into Robert’s chest. ‘Dad, Dad, I’ve found a badger.’

‘A dead one? Where?’

‘On the forest road.’

‘And you pulled him all the way back?’

‘I put him on a bin liner and dragged him.’ He was tugging at Robert’s sleeve to make him come and look.

‘Hey, hey. Say hello to Uncle Stephen.’

‘Hello,’ Adam said, but he was too shy to make eye contact and seemed to be hoping that if he didn’t look at Stephen he might disappear. ‘ Dad .’

Robert let himself be tugged around the corner of the house and, not knowing what else to do, Stephen followed. A path led by the vegetable patch, where last year’s yellowing cabbage stalks stuck out of the muddy ground, white and flabby and marked at intervals with leaf scars like ringworm. A whiff of decay, which Stephen held his breath to avoid encountering, and then they were out on to a long sloping lawn that led down to a stand of trees — conifers of some kind, an advance guard of the invading forest.

The badger was sprawled on his back, legs splayed, a trickle of black blood running down from one side of his mouth. His fangs were bared, snarling at the car he’d seen too late. Bending over him, Stephen had the feeling that if you looked long enough into those golden eyes you’d see headlights on a road at night, just as earlier generations believed that a murderer’s image was preserved on the victim’s retina.

Robert knelt down on the grass and touched the pads of the front paw. ‘He’s still warm.’ He ran his hands across the thick pelt, frost-tipped hairs flattened by his hand springing up again as soon as it passed over them, as if they, at least, were still alive. ‘Poor old thing.’

Adam stood behind his shoulder, breathing heavily through his open mouth, excitement and the pride of discovery struggling with a sorrow he hadn’t known that he felt till now.

The January day was closing in. Stephen was intensely aware of them as three figures, three related figures, in a winter landscape, with the blank windows of the farmhouse behind them. Something to do with Robert’s hand resting on the badger’s pelt. His hand. Their father’s hand.