Pat Barker - Border Crossing

all the time, but… Bloody hens still had to be fed. I knew I ought to go down and help her, but I didn’t. I turned the binoculars round, and then she was just a little beetle crawling across the yard.’

A silence. ‘You still blamed her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see your father again before the trial?’

‘No. And I wouldn’t have seen him then if the newspapers hadn’t found him.’

‘He came every day.’

‘Shamed into it.’

‘And he visited you at Long Garth.’

‘Ego trip. My son at boarding school. The minute I tried to talk about anything, he got up and walked out. Well, I told you. I watched him from the bedroom window, striding away down the drive, fast as his legs could carry him.’

‘What did you feel, watching him walk away like that?’

A flash of impatience. ‘What do you think I felt?’

‘I don’t want to guess, Danny. I want you to tell me.’

‘Nothing much. He’d walked out before, he was walking out again. That was what he did best.’

He looked drained.

‘I think we should leave it there,’ Tom said.

Probably not a good moment to leave it, but then no moment was going to be good. Whatever happened in these sessions Danny would be alone with it afterwards. Tom tried to imagine the room he was going back to.

On the pavement Danny hesitated, the light from two street lamps disputing his shadow. ‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘Thursday.’

A brief, taut smile, and he was gone.

At six, Tom gave up trying to sleep, pulled on a tracksuit and trainers, and let himself out of the house. The river was smooth as glass, but as the sun rose the wind sharpened, flicking the brown water into little skips and bursts of foam. He loved this: the smell of the sea on the dawn wind, the city, with its precipitous streets tumbling down the hillside, silent in the clear air.

He jogged past the empty warehouses in a capsule of his own noise: gasping breath, pulsing blood, pounding feet. He was thinking about Lauren: the messages he’d left on her answering machine, the cool voice that returned his calls. She’d decided it was over, and the fact that he hadn’t jumped on a train and gone down to see her meant he thought so too.

She was coming home this weekend, and he was well aware it might be for the last time. He’d spent half the night thinking of ways of rescuing the situation. A long holiday? But she was about to start term, and hehad to finish the book. Six months’ trial separation? But they were separated already. They’d had all the time in the world to think. He stopped by one of the deserted quays, clinging to the rusting railings while he fought for breath. Far below the river sweated oil.

Back home, he showered, forced down two slices of toast, and set off for the station. Still preoccupied, he parked the car, bought a newspaper, located the right platform, paced up and down, all on automatic pilot, hardly aware of the sour smell of old smoke in the station, or the people hurrying past. And then, suddenly, he was here, inside his own body, his own life, this moment. He took a deep breath. The smell made him think that somewhere up there, trapped under the glass roof with its colony of golden-eyed pigeons, were the ghosts of steam trains of the past: diesel fumes, burning coke, wet coal, smoke clearing slowly from platforms, passengers emerging after long journeys with soot-smudged faces and red veins in the whites of their eyes.

Lauren was wearing a silver-grey trouser suit, and she was not in the least red-eyed. During the night he’d rehearsed countless ways in which she might say what he was convinced she was going to say. Blurt it out, right there on the station? No, not Lauren’s style. Wait till evening, and tell him over dinner, drowning bad news in litres of red wine? Risking the inevitably uninhibited row that would follow? He should have known better. Lauren walked towards him along the platform, swinging two extremely large, and obviously empty, suitcases. She didn’t need words at all.

Automatically, he tried to take the suitcases from her.

‘No need,’ she said, lifting them up and down to show how light they were.

They walked out of the station to the car. Lauren raised her face to the mizzle. ‘Why is it always raining here?’

It’s raining everywhere.’

‘Not everywhere. It was fine in London.’

She swung the suitcases on to the back seat, and got in beside him. The air in the car smelt cold, foisty and damp. When he switched the heater on, the windows misted over.

‘You’re taking a few things back with you then?’

She turned to him in the dingy light. ‘Well, actually, Tom, it’s a bit more than that. I don’t think things are working out. For either of us. So I thought I’d — well, you know.’

‘Move out’

‘Yes. I want a divorce.’

No point challenging Lauren with plain speaking. She was on for any amount of it.

‘A divorce.’ Somehow the word shocked him. He’d been thinking of separation, of… He didn’t think she’d got that far.

‘It’s not working, Tom, is it?’

He might have insisted it was. As long as he claimed the marriage was alive, she couldn’t unilaterally declare it to be dead. ‘No,’ he said.

He flicked a lever up and water jetted on to the windscreen. Squeak, whine… whoosh. More water. Whoosh. ‘Well, we can’t sit here all day,’ he said.

‘Don’t backput. You can’t see.’

‘It’s okay. The heater’ll work in a minute.’

But she got out, leant into the car through the back door and rubbed condensation off the rear window, her face, in profile, tight, preoccupied, exasperated. Everything about him was wrong at the moment. It was the only way she could get through it.

When he’d reversed safely, he said, ‘Will you be going back tonight?’ He could ask that quite calmly and coldly. None of it was real to him yet.

‘No, I thought I’d stay over. If that’s all right?’

‘Be my guest.’

That helped both of them. They drove the rest of the way home in a satisfyingly irritated silence.

The silence didn’t last. They owed it to their marriage to talk, and talk they did, endlessly, though not because there was anything left to say.

Dinner was in a Chinese restaurant, whose dark-red flock wallpaper made Tom feel he was trapped inside somebody’s mysteriously fur-lined intestines. ‘ The marriage’, as they’d begun to call it, sat with them at the table. They ordered food, and picked at it, and a litre bottle of wine that they sank in record time.‘The thing is,’ Lauren said, not quite steadily,’ can’t stand not being wanted. I know it’s not your fault, I know you can’t help it, it’s not voluntary, I know that, and I’m not blaming you, I’m really, truly not blaming you, but I can’t stand it. It’s… I just feel completely and utterly humiliated. I feel as if I’m turning into this little dried-up shrivelled old woman—’

‘You’re not. You’re beautiful.’

‘But that’s how it feels.’

‘I’m sorry. ‘He spread his hands helplessly. ‘I don’t know what else to say, except it’s my fault. It’s not yours. I don’t understand why it’s happened any more than you do.’

‘I can’t go on.’

‘No, I know you can’t. ‘Silence.’And I can’t say, “Give it another six months, it’ll get better,” because… it’s not like that. I don’t know what else I can say.’

Back home, drinking the second bottle, they found plenty to say, both of them. Round and round, up and down. The fact was, Tom thought, in one of those moments of total clarity that characterize drunkenness, they actually needed to have a short, simple conversation, and they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, because it seemed an insult to everything that had happened in the last ten years. So they kept burying and disinterring, and carrying out elaborate rambling inquests. At last, exhausted, in the early hours of the morning, they started a full-scale row, only to stop in the middle of it, slightly embarrassed, realizing they no longer knew each other well enough.