Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

Ash dropped on to the bubbled paintwork of the windowsill and she carried her cigarette into the bathroom and doused it under the tap, careful to avoid the mirror there, for she too wished to remember herself differently. She sat on the toilet seat, panting, then crept back to the bedroom and eased herself between the sheets. Soon, the sun would break through the lower branches of the trees that grew alongside the drive. Already the first birds were beginning, single notes, tentative, as if their instinct for the light might be mistaken. She shut her eyes. For the first time in days she felt herself relaxing, almost a swoon. Now, she thought, now would not be a bad time; and once again she felt it, the sensation of an approach, the secret certainty that someone was moving towards her, distant still, but closer to her every hour, someone who would help her do it, who would know how to help her. It frightened her a little but she wanted him to come, and she opened her hands, thinking it would be best to be ready.

The Reverend Osbourne jogged over the grass in his mackintosh. The rain had caught him in the open, crossing the meadow beside the potato field and still three hundred yards from the shelter of the trees at Brooklands. The grass was sopping and seeds stuck to the cuffs of his trousers, but he couldn’t run any faster. He hadn’t the breath for it.

He had spent the morning at the hospital with Alice Valentine, who had suffered some manner of seizure on the previous Wednesday. It was Mrs Samson who had alerted him to it, though she had not been there when it happened, and didn’t seem to know how serious it might be. He had tried to call Alec, and when that hadn’t worked, had made enquiries of his own, finally tracing Alice to the ladies’ wing of a ward in the Royal he knew quite well. She was asleep when he went in, so he sat on the chair beside her and waited, feeling suddenly old and tired himself. They were almost the same age, and he had known her for more than twenty years, ever since Stephen’s accident when he had gone to the house to discuss the arrangements for the funeral, and had found a handsome, businesslike woman, a clear thinker, and someone rather brutally honest, telling him without mincing her words that her husband had been an alcoholic and that he had never had any time for religion, never found any consolation in it. He had promised her that the service would be brief and to the point, and that was how it was. A few words on Stephen’s work at the school, his politics (with which the reverend had some sympathy). A little of the old poetry from the King James. At the graveside, Stephen’s family had rather shunned her, but then she hardly seemed to notice them. A cold day. Frost in the shadows, and only a pair of yews to shelter them from the wind. She wore a plain dark winter’s coat with no gloves or headscarf. And though there was sadness in her eyes she hadn’t cried. Not there in front of them.

The boys had been with her, of course, and occasionally she stroked the younger one’s hair to reassure him. The other one, Larry, had taken it upon himself to be the man of the house, and though he couldn’t have been much more than thirteen at the time he did it extraordinarily well, shaking hands, putting people at ease. Everyone mentioned it. The gift of knowing what to do. You couldn’t teach people that.

Then afterwards, when the cars had gone, the reverend had found that he couldn’t stop thinking of her. Her stillness. Her pride. She would enter his mind at the most awkward moments. Raising the host at communion or marrying some young couple on a Saturday, his thoughts suddenly clouded with envy. For the first time in his life he had wanted something – someone – as much as he wanted God. That was what it amounted to. But he had been too cautious, too unsure of his ground, too concerned with the opinions of others. Afraid for it to be thought that he was taking advantage, a widow fresh in her loss, the earth hardly bedded down on her husband’s grave. So he had missed his chance – if, indeed, there had ever been a chance. For it was hard to think she could have been interested in him. A Blimpish priest. An old bachelor even then, in his forties, with his garden, his books, his slide shows of the Holy Land. What had he had to offer a woman like Alice? It was almost comical really. What possible advantage could she have found in loving him ?

When she woke, startling him, he was not sure that she recognized him, not at first. Heaven knows what they had given her. Yet somehow they managed a conversation, though he had found it hard to follow the flight of her thinking, and after fifteen minutes the effort of expressing herself made her irritable and tearful. She accused him of coming to see if she was dead. She demanded to know where Alec was, why he hadn’t come, a question the reverend was at a loss to answer. But when it was time for him to leave (they were bringing in the lunch trolleys, those fiercely jolly women), she had not wanted to let go of his hand and so he had stayed standing by the bed until, quite unexpectedly, something revived in her, something of the old Alice, and she had smiled at him and said, ‘Go on, Dennis. Off you go.’

On his way out he managed to corner the ward sister, an enormously fat young woman called Shirley or Shelly, who assured him that in all likelihood Alice would be free to go home in a day or two. It was a decision for the consultant, of course, and he wouldn’t be doing his rounds until Monday, but there was no reason to suppose he would want to keep her in. This was the good news the reverend wished to pass on, in person, to Alec, though it was not the only reason for his visit to Brooklands. There was something else, difficult to pin down or explain; a nagging uneasiness that had found its way into the shadow play of his dreams, where among the scurryings, the unexpected faces, the sudden departures, he had had the sensation of an impending danger; and though the nature of the threat had remained obscure, he was convinced it had something to do with the Valentines, and with Alec in particular, and that as a friend of the family and a man of the cloth, it was his duty to try to do something. After all, Alec had had his difficulties in the past. That business a few years back when he had simply disappeared, until they found him, the authorities, somewhere on the South Coast, on a beach apparently, though the reverend had never been certain whether he was merely walking along the beach, or out towards the sea.

That morning, the third since his mother had gone into the hospital, Alec had woken with the idea of creating a refuge for himself in the unused summerhouse in the garden. Somewhere to go when the others came, a place to retreat to with the play. No one had used the summerhouse for as long as he could remember. It was Stephen’s folly, a glorified tool-shed with a single window, some shelving, a bench outside. Honeysuckle and ivy had grown thickly over the wooden walls and roof, and probably stopped the place from falling down.

On a hook in the hallway he had found a ring of keys with a paper tag inscribed ‘Garden’; one of the keys had turned the mortise lock in the summerhouse door, and he had stepped into an air, fungal and slightly sour, like old cider. His first job was to empty the place, and he began to carry out old paint tins and lengths of timber, jars of slug pellets and turpentine, and the delicate remains of field mice and butterflies. He scrubbed the walls, then broke the skin of paint in one of the tins and got to work with a wide brush, spattering paint on his jeans and wishing the summerhouse were much larger, so these tasks might last him for days, and there would be no time to brood on what had happened, to replay for the hundredth time the memory of Alice slumped in her chair on the terrace, a mouthful of tea slopping over her chin and falling in threads to her cardigan.