Pat Barker: Border Crossing

They didn’t speak at all on the way back. He hadn’t bothered to put his trainers on and the pebbles hurt his feet. As soon as they were in the house, Lauren took him upstairs to have a look at the cut. ‘It’s not too bad,’ she said, peering down at it.

‘They always look worse than they are,’ he said, impatient to have it over.

She washed his arm with a sterile solution, till the sides of the small wound gaped white, then pressed the edges together and applied a clear, waterproof dressing. She didn’t speak as she worked and was breathing audibly, as children do when they concentrate. A dim memory of playing doctors and nurses with his slightly older girl cousins came back to him. He’d always been the patient, he remembered, though in those far-off games it had never been his arm that required attention. There was something erotic in Lauren’s intent, impersonal gaze, and he put his free hand on her hip.

‘Hot bath,’ Lauren said, closing the lid of the first-aid box. ‘Do you a lot more good than whisky.’

Resigned, he stripped off his wet clothes. She was bending over the bath, stirring the water, her face slick with steam. ‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’

‘Depends what he took. Prozac, yes. Paracetamol, no.’

‘Do you think we should ring?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We did what we could. It’s somebody else’s problem now.’

‘I’ll put these into wash,’ she said, picking up his clothes.

He could see she was disappointed. She’d wanted to talk, to polish the shared-but-different experience until it acquired an even patina, became theirs, rather than his and hers. But he was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments. He’d learnt early, in his first few months of practice, that those who take the misery home with them burn out and end up no use to anybody. He’d learnt to value detachment: the clinician’s splinter of ice in the heart. Only much later had he learnt to distrust it too — its capacity to grow and take over the personality. Splinter of ice? He’d had colleagues who could have sunk the Titanic.

Gingerly, he lowered his aching shoulders into the water. Looking along the length of his body, he saw his cock, slightly engorged from the heat, gleaming and bobbing in the foam like a cylindrical fish. Well, hello, there, he thought, slipping into the mid-Atlantic drawl he used to distance pain.

‘Are you any warmer?’ Lauren asked, coming back with an armful of towels.

‘Bit. Why don’t you get in? You must be frozen.’

Dropping her clothes in a heap near the door, she climbed into the bath behind him, and lowered herself cautiously into the water. ‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry.’ He kept forgetting his ‘hot bath’ was Lauren’s idea of being boiled alive. ‘Would you like more cold?’

‘No, it’s all right. I’m in now.’

Her breath came in little explosive bursts against his back. He could feel her breasts pressing against his shoulder blades, and then her hand crept round, burrowing between his legs until she found, and cradled, his balls.

‘Not fair,’ he said. ‘I can’t reach anything.’

Groping under his arm, he found a nipple, and felt her laughter vibrate in his chest. A flash memory of cold mud sucking him in. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

They dried each other, then he chased her upstairs, and they fell on to the bed, where they lay, gasping for breath. Her eye, an inch away from his, was a grey fish caught in a mesh of lines. For the first time in months he didn’t know or care where she was in her cycle. This had nothing to do with ovulation or getting her pregnant, and not much to do, if he were honest, with loving her. Everything to do with the moment when he’d seen the boy’s body hang suspended, like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air. He saw him now. The boundaries of flesh and bone seemed to vanish. He was staring at his own death.

Afterwards they lay side by side, a medieval knight and lady on a tomb.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He knew she hadn’t come.

‘It’s all right.’

He felt the bed shaking and knew she’d started to cry. ‘Lauren

She sat up. ‘Do you realize you risked your life back there for a complete fucking stranger?’

If this had been said with a scintilla of admiration, he’d have felt obliged to pooh-pooh the idea, to point out that he swam further than that every other day of his life, but her tone was aggressive, and he matched it. ‘There was no choice.’

A stubborn silence.

‘If I wasn’t a strong swimmer, I wouldn’t have gone in. But I am. And, anyway, I’m all right.’

She wasn’t angry with him for diving into the river.She was angry about the botched sex, and about his failure to get her pregnant. ‘Let’s have a drink, shall we?’

He didn’t expect her to follow him downstairs, and she didn’t. If only getting pregnant hadn’t become such an obsession. She reminded him of one of those female fish that, in times of environmental hardship, dispense with the male sex altogether, and carry his gonads in a purse on their sides. Well, sod that, he thought, glugging whisky. He was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank.

His mother (not that she knew the details, thank God!) blamed their difficulties on the new pattern of their lives. For the past year Lauren had been working in London, teaching at St Margaret’s School of Art, coming home only at weekends. ‘Husband and wife should stick together,’ his mother had said, sniffing over the tea towel she was using to polish a glass. ‘You and Dad were apart when he was in the army.’ ‘And a fat lot of good it did us,’ she flashed back at him.

But marriage was different now, he told her. Women didn’t expect to sacrifice their careers to their husbands.

‘Marriage doesn’t change as much as you think,’ she said, with another sniff. ‘You’d be better off sticking together.’

At the time he’d dismissed her as old-fashioned. Now it didn’t seem as simple as that. In his bleaker moments, he wondered whether he and Lauren hadn’t separated already, without even letting themselves know they were doing it. He could have gone to London with her. He was on sabbatical at the moment, writing up a three-year research project, and books can be written anywhere. There would have been nothing to stop him e-mailing chapters to his colleagues for comment, and if he had needed a face-to-face meeting he could have come back for a few days, or overnight. He hadn’t gone because he wanted to stay here. And since then, month by month, the sex had deteriorated. He blamed thermometers, calendars and pots of urine, and okay, he did find them a total turn-off, but there was something else he wasn’t admitting. Perhaps he’d just voted with… Well. Not with his feet.

‘Why?’ Lauren asked, after one of his not infrequent failures.

‘I don’t know.’

But she was having no truck with that. He was a psychologist, for Christ’s sake. It was his job to know.

He’d downed one tumbler of whisky, and was starting on the next, when Lauren came into the kitchen, and wrapped her arms around him. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘What you did was very brave and I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘For hating you for doing it.’

Suddenly they were both laughing, and, for a few moments, it was all right.

*

It was late evening before he remembered the post. He’d left the house yesterday in a tremendous hurry because he’d thought he was going to be late for Lauren’s train, and didn’t want to leave her stranded at the station. The postman had met him a few yards from the front door and handed him the mail. Without bothering to glance at it, he’d shoved it into his coat pocket, and then, absorbed in discussing the difficulties of the marriage, he’d forgotten all about it.