Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

She’d watched him undress, the faintest of smiles playing across her mouth. As he stepped into the bath goose bumps broke out on his arms and legs. Slowly, he’d sunk into its warmth. Neither of them spoke. As he went farther, submerging his shoulders and head, she’d lifted herself to give him room, revealing her breasts, rising slick above the water. When he rose again he drew her towards him, sending splashes swilling over the bath’s rim. Which is when she finally spoke. “What took you so long?” she said, speaking into his neck. “A girl could get bored up here all alone.”

Afterwards they’d stumbled into the bedroom, wrapped in half-undone towels and each other’s limbs, their wet bodies imprinting patterns of their embrace across the duvet and pillows. Drugged by the warmth of the bath, they’d moved slowly, as if they’d just woken. Caroline’s hair was damp, and felt as heavy as velvet when Michael wrapped it about his knuckles. She’d turned over so he could enter her from behind, her back, hips, and arse making the shape of a cello as she rose onto the heels of her palms and pushed herself against him. But she wanted to see him as well as feel him, so, pulling away, she’d turned round and drawn him on top of her. The friction of their bodies released the amber perfume of the bath oils still on their skin. Michael travelled steadily inside her, inching himself deeper until she held his full length and he came, powerfully and suddenly.

For a moment they’d lain in the wake of his climax, the full weight of his body pressing her into the bed, their hearts working against each other. But then, before he began ebbing from her, Caroline rolled Michael onto his back and sat astride him. From that position, with his hands cupping her breasts, she’d looked down at him, her hair swinging about her face, obscuring then revealing her fool’s-gold eyes as they held his. Grinding her hips with a heightening tempo, she’d pushed herself down against the firmness of his stomach. As she’d worked faster and harder her head began to rise until, showing him the full tautness of her throat, she, too, came, crying out over the sounds of the rain-loud city beyond their window.

When Michael woke the next morning it had been as simple as a single thought repeating in his mind, a voice belonging to both his past and his future self. “I don’t want this to stop.” But with it came a fear he hadn’t experienced so purely since childhood. It was the trepidation of happiness, a spreading sensation in his chest provoked by a joy so palpable that by its very nature it was unbearably fragile, too — beaten thin in its expansion, ephemeral before the certainties of life, death.

As Caroline showered, she, too, became aware of a shift in her perception. In previous relationships her single life had been a whispering promise she’d had to keep at bay. But now that whisper had faded to silence, and she realised where once she’d only ever wanted herself, now she wanted Michael too. As she’d lain on top of him the previous night, both of them breathing like sprinters, distant cars sounding over the bridge, she’d felt a subtle conception somewhere deep within her. Not of a child, but of what, if she allowed it, could happen next. Because this was no longer about sex or feeling wanted or new experience. And this is what she told Michael over their breakfast that morning. That it wasn’t about infatuation or abating loneliness. It was about something else now, but whatever it was, she could speak of it only in terms of what it wasn’t because she’d never felt it before. But, she said, pouring them coffee and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, what she did know was that she wanted more of it. Whatever it was, she wanted more.

―

The following spring they watched, Michael’s arm across Caroline’s shoulders, as the removal company’s lorry manoeuvred its way down the lane towards Coed y Bryn. As it lumbered towards them, rocking in the potholes, broken stalks of cow parsley shivered in its wing mirrors, as if it had been decorated expressly for this, its arrival at their marital home.

For the first week they went nowhere other than the local shops or takeaways. As they opened each packing crate and box, the objects of their previous lives began to fill the low-beamed rooms of Coed y Bryn. Lamps from New York, rugs from Kabul, a set of chairs from Berlin. Caroline, Michael discovered, owned two guitars, neither of which she could play. He, meanwhile, to appease her pleading, agreed to try on his student fencing kit she’d found, gutting it with glee from a musty kitbag. The creases in the jacket were stiff with age, but it still fit him, as did the breeches, streaked with long rust stains from the blades they’d been wrapped around. Pulling on the equally rust-patched mask, Caroline had picked up one of his épées, its coquille dented and scratched, and come at him with it, slashing at his arms, crying, “Defend yourself! Defend yourself!”

In the afternoons, despite her inexperience, Caroline attacked the garden with equal enthusiasm, working quickly and haphazardly. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she didn’t care. She wanted, she told Michael, to feel this turn in their lives between her fingers, in the soil of their new home, in its moisture seeping through her jeans as she knelt at the bramble-choked shrubs and bushes.

While the shadows of the May evenings lengthened over Caroline in the garden, a haze of midges blurring the air above her, Michael continued working inside, unpacking and arranging the furniture of their single lives. At night, whether it was cold or not, they lit the wood stove, opened a bottle of wine, and fitted themselves into a single armchair to talk about their future and watch the hills through the window turn inky against a darkening sky.

But already, even in those first months, Michael could sense the cottage alone might not be enough for Caroline. Their rhythms were complementary but different, and the move to Coed y Bryn had revealed this in a way their London lives had not. Both he and Caroline were storytellers, not of their own lives but of others’. It was this vocational territory, of exploring and shaping beyond themselves, that they’d first shared. It was what had first brought them together. But where Michael always retreated to his desk to tell his stories, Caroline had simply moved on to the next. For her their telling was a need, a hunger. Her belief in the truth being told was almost fanatical, whatever the outcome of a story’s exposure. Where Michael would carefully weigh his content for repercussion or hurt, Caroline had always been fearless with consequence.

“Why wouldn’t you be?” she’d once challenged him. “Anything that happens is only what should have happened anyway, if it was known in the first place. And what’s the alternative?” she’d asked him, warming to her theme. “The untold story,” she’d said, pointing at him like an accuser. “It’s like landfill. We can bury it all we like, but in time it’ll catch up with us.”

Her passion was infectious and Caroline’s commitment to her craft had been one of the traits Michael had most admired about her when they’d first met. But he also knew it wasn’t without self-interest. For him the life of his subject was another country, one he discovered first in person, and then again on the page. Once back at his desk his stories travelled further than he had, went where he’d been unable to go, leaving Michael behind as a silent still point, a governing hand from afar. But for Caroline the stories of others were her fuel. She travelled for them and through them. Their birthing into the light was her nutrition, their telling what kept her moving.

“We can be still here.” This is what she’d said to him when they’d first viewed Coed y Bryn and the estate agent had left them alone to talk. Michael had wanted to believe her, and as they’d bedded in over that spring, he’d continued to do so. But sometimes, when they walked to the top of the hill behind the cottage, or when he found her looking out of its windows on the landing, he’d catch a flicker in her expression, as if it wasn’t freedom she saw in those hills, fields, and woods, but constriction.