Pat Barker: Border Crossing

He spent the rest of the morning, and most of the afternoon, creeping round the house, or listening to messages on the answering machine. The phone rang every two or three minutes, some calls from journalists wanting to talk about Danny, others from friends who’d heard the news of his split with Lauren. He would have to return those calls, but he didn’t feel like doing it now. The person he most wanted to hear from was Martha, but she didn’t ring, too busy handing Danny over to whoever was going to supervise him through the next stage of his life. The next identity.

After lunch, he tried to do some work on the book, but could neither hold a pen nor type for very long. What he really needed was to get away, and towards evening he left the house by the back way, along the river path, walked into town and took the train to Alnmouth, where he spent the night. Next morning, he hired a car and set off for Hadrian’s Wall.

His plan was to walk along the Wall westwards from Homesteads over Cuddy’s Crags, Hotbank Crags, Milking Gap, high above the steely waters of Crag Lough, and on to Peel Crags and Winshields. But by the time he reached Vindolanda it was blowing a gale. He persevered for a time, staggering in the gusts, but the wind threatened to blow him off the Wall, and along with other disappointed walkers he was obliged to turn back.

Instead, he drove to the coast, parked the car and walked across the causeway to Holy Island. It was low tide. The flat, shining, level sands stretched out for miles on either side of the road. It was difficult to believe that at high tide the ground he was walking on would be fifteen feet below the sea.

The causeway was longer than he’d remembered. He was sweating by the time he reached the sign by the side of the road: WELCOME TO THE HOLY ISLAND OF LINDISFRANE. He climbed the steep hill on the other side, following a path that ran between sand dunes crowned by plumes of bleached marram grass.

He walked all the way round the island, looking at the cormorants that lined the cliffs on the seaward side, their black wingp hung out to dry. Thirteen hundred years ago, Eadfrith and Billfrith, Dark Age scribes, had used those birds to illuminate the Lindis-farne Gospels, thick, supple, snake-like necks coiled around the initial pages of St Matthew and St John. Yet surely then, as now, they must have seemed ominous, those black shapes against the sky, harbingers of death.

At lunchtime he went to the nearest pub, ate sandwiches, drank rather too much beer and lingered by the fireside, talking to a middle-aged couple who were on a walking holiday and, like him, had been forced to abandon their original plan of walking along the Wall. Eventually they left, saying they would try again tomorrow, and he sat on by the fire, sinking into a bovine reverie as the warmth lulled the pain in his hand to sleep.

When, finally, he left the pub, he discovered that a sea fret had blown in across the island, and the sand dunes were half hidden in drifting veils of vapour. He made slow progress. His joints had stiffened during the long rest by the fire, and at times he seemed to be merely hobbling along. The sea fret had brought with it a drop in temperature, and the palm of his hand prickled and burned.

He was less than halfway across the causeway when the mist thickened. Looking round, he saw that the island had vanished, and that the coast ahead of him was no more than a dark smudge in the all-encompassing white. Only the midway refuge, a hundred yards ahead, was still visible. He wondered if he should turn back, but that would mean spending the night on the island, and although, at this time of year, it would be easy to get a room, the prospect made him feel claustrophobic. He peered out over the water, trying to judge how long it would be to high tide. The sea had another nine or ten feet to rise before it even lipped the edges of the road. Plenty of time.

The mist was damp. The surface hairs on his woollen sweater were matted with drops of moisture, though it had not rained. Now and then, a wave lifted the masses of bladderwrack on the beach, and let them fall again, releasing a pungent smell of salt water and decay. His footsteps echoed, seeming to bounce back at him from the wall of mist. It was easy to imagine that somebody else was out there, walking towards him. This was a place for the unexpected, the near-miraculous meeting. It would not have surprised him to see Danny emerge from the sea fret, with that curious walk of his, head down, hands deep in his pockets, striding along as if he had all the space in the world. As if he were walking through some internal landscape, for where, in the confined places of his upbringing, could he ever have learnt to walk like that?

Tom stopped to look out over the water. He was thinking that Danny had won. That in the end, like Angus, like no doubt countless other people whose names hedidn’t know, he’d bent the rules for Danny. Two nights ago — only two nights, it seemed much longer than that — he’d seen Danny lapse into a borderline psychotic state, and Tom’s vague general warning to Martha had not gone nearly far enough. He knew that if, at some future time, Danny were to set a fire in which somebody died, his silence on that night would return to haunt him. He knew what he should have done. Only, at the crucial moment, Danny had turned to look at him, and it had not seemed possible to betray him.

A wave seethed in the bladderwrack at his feet. He looked around and saw that the tide was racing in fast, the last few yards of sand disappearing faster than he would have believed possible. Already it was too late to go back to the refuge, far, far too late to return to the island. He had no choice but to go on. Heart thudding against his ribs, he broke into a run. Surges of water, laced with foam, flooded the road in front of him. He splashed through them, gagging from the effort.

Then, suddenly, the ground was dry again. He slowed to a walk, legs trembling, feeling that he’d panicked for no reason. Though when he looked back, he saw that the road ran straight into the sea. The whole central section of the causeway had disappeared under the water. Only the refuge, high on its stilts, becoming clearer, minute by minute, as the mists round Lindisfame receded, was left to look out over the swirling tide.

A week after he got back home, Tom woke to a new noise. The light bulb in the kitchen was swinging on the end of its flex. He went to the front door and looked out, but could see nothing.

After breakfast, he ventured into the decaying hinterland of warehouses, sheds and factories, and saw a bright-yellow crane with a huge metal ball dangling from its jib. As he watched, the crane reversed, the ball swung and struck the side of a building, the blow sending spasmodic jerks rattling up the chain. Plaster and brick dust leaked from the open wound. Clumsily, the crane reversed. Another shock, another succession of shudders running up the chain. This time a whole section of the wall collapsed.

He spent the next few weeks living on the edge of a building site, doors and windows kept shut against the noise and dust. Curiously the work going on around him seemed to lift his mood. He worked steadily on the book, amazed he could work at all, for whenever he lifted his eyes from the screen he was aware of Lauren’s absence. Soon he was going to have to decide what to do about the house — what to do with himself— but the book came first.

Martha read it chapter by chapter, commented, commented again on the next draft. They met, now, several times a week, developing a habit of takeaway suppers with cans of beer. When she was there the house seemed less hollow. Always, as soon as he was alone, the absence rushed in, though, as time went by, it became more difficult to say whether the absence was Lauren’s, or Martha’s.