Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

Without a sound, the gin and tonic in Natalie’s hand slumps over, depositing a many-petalled effervescent bloom onto the cushion where Dan would have sat.

Mike Vickers carefully applies weight to the pole — an expert puntist’s clothes are never wetted by so much as a drop — feels it slide a good foot down into the primeval mud, and leaves it standing there to trap the punt against the landing stage. He disembarks nimbly, dries his hand on a handkerchief and offers it to the ladies. Victoria. Lulu. Natalie.

‘Nat?’ Natalie clambers out distractedly, knee first, ignoring his assistance. She’s spilled her drink across the seat. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Fine,’ she replies, distantly, looking past him. ‘Fine.’ She straightens but makes no move away from the bank. Mike follows her gaze to Dan, who’s talking to, or rather being talked to by, of all people, James Fuck Fakes Saunders. Jesus, thinks Mike, seeing James’ inelegant get-up. If you’re going to come, at least make some sort of effort. At the same time he feels a surge of relief that his fairy godbrother is here.

‘Come on,’ he says, touching her arm. ‘Let’s go and rescue your dearly beloved. And I’ll introduce you to someone.’

Natalie drifts forward, murmuring. ‘Is this some kind of—’

James F. Saunders didn’t expect to meet Death on this gin-soaked lawn, let alone Love. But here They both are, sitting in the same electric wheelchair. More self-satisfaction than self-pity. Love conquers all.

The man smiles suddenly, and half-raises a hand to wave. James turns to see Mike prancing up from the riverbank with his bevy of ladies. Two of them — one imperiously tall and dark, the other imperiously blonde and tanned — diverge towards rival party factions, leaving Mike with the third. The third is a freckly redhead, all of about five foot two.

The cheerful backdrop, the staging, falls away. Every hour, on the hour. Even to the original air-blue gown. No. Yes.

Dan can’t easily shade his eyes. Venus is still up there, tracing out her less fortunate ellipse, thirty million miles closer to the blazing sun, out of line now but still lost in its dazzle: the slenderest eyelash of a backlit crescent, if you knew where to look.

‘Nat tried to drown us all,’ says Mike. ‘We had to tie her up and lock ’er in the foc’sle. Afternoon, James, old chap. So good of you to make it after all. Now, who needs a drink?’

As Dan looks up at Mike, he notices Mike’s gaze wander with a frown across to his scruffy, plain-speaking friend, James. Dan’s own gaze wanders from Mike across to Natalie. Suddenly, the earth that he again feels rolling on its axis is a planet whose laws he doesn’t understand quite as well as he thought.

His wife is standing as still as the sundial, her blue dress slightly rucked on her hip from sitting in the low seat of the punt. Her face is expressionless, but has the barely perceptible colouring and the extra-glossiness of eyes that always betray her discomposure. The fingers of her empty hands, at her sides, are held just a little too straight. She looks like she might break into a run. She looks magnificent.

‘Is someone going to say something?’ Mike’s voice, far away.

Dan drags his eyes from Natalie and directs them up, up, towards the focus of her attention, James, who is standing at his side. James glances down at him. Their connection, their understanding has been displaced by something else. James looks back at Natalie. He seems at last to breathe.

‘Hello, Becks.’

Natalie Mock, née Beckett, feels herself to be in two places at once, and in each place she is a different person. One of the two is laughing, sliding down a snowy slope on her backside, with her boyfriend clutching her from behind, his weight pressing her to accelerate. They’re out of control, going much too fast, but the hill miraculously steers them past each threatening rock or tree, and they come to rest in a painless tangle with cold hands and ears and arses, and hot hearts. It’s her twenty-first birthday.

The other is here, in this sultry corrupted Eden — wife, carer, homeowner and unfulfilled office pen-pusher. James is in both places, and he hasn’t changed a bit.

James F. Saunders, seeing the changes wrought by ten years in a remembered face, feels a sickening, thrilling jolt — the wake left by time’s thundering passage. It’s not that Becks has aged in any trite, pejorative sense. She looks wonderful, in her Becksish way. But in that instant he sees for what it is his long-preserved, long-treasured sense of their star-crossed union — it recoils from her undeniably, unanswerably altered reality, back into the distant past where it belongs.

‘Why does he call you that, anyway? “Becks.”’

‘He always did. It’s the name he first heard — it was a school nickname, and I was backpacking with a school friend who used it. He sort of adopted it.’ Natalie doesn’t add the recollection that James said he preferred Becks to Nat — the sound, the strength of it — and that at the time she felt the same.

‘Huh,’ says Dan, nodding as though assimilating a significant fact. ‘You never told me that. The funny thing is, I always imagined him as a Chris.’ Natalie knows she shouldn’t find the subject uncomfortable, which only compounds her discomfort. ‘Have a few moments with him,’ adds Dan. ‘I don’t mind. In fact, I’d rather you did.’ Then he smiles. ‘Mocks.’

‘I don’t think I’ve got anything to say to him.’ But Dan quietly, sincerely insists. This, apparently, is an ordeal that must be gone through.

‘Hello, Becks. It’s great to see you.’

‘It’s good to see you too.’

James takes note of the moderated adjective. ‘You look great. Grown up. Sort of, er, womanly. I’m really sorry about your husband. It must be hard. Seems like a great guy.’ This is where James’ decade of wordsmithery has got him: great to see you, you look great, seems like a great guy. But he finds he’s not afraid of using the wrong words.

‘We do okay. And you — you’re here on your own?’

James smiles and nods. ‘Yep.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Yorkshire. On the coast. After uni I didn’t get far. You?’

‘Reading,’ she says, with defensive force, and then adds, perhaps in mitigation (though James hears too a note of reproach), ‘I work there.’

He savours the next pause. It could last almost forever because of what he’s going to say at the end of it. She’s looking through the willow fronds towards the sparkling play of evening sun on the river. It’s beautiful. Mike was right — he could write here. Or just exist here, for a while. He breathes in. And out.

‘Have you ever thought about me?’

Becks — Natalie — glances up with an eyebrow raised derisively, but then says, ‘Once or twice.’ James is surprised when she adds, after a pause, eyes fixed back on those miraculous, ever-changing, never-repeating reflections, ‘You?’

He smiles again. ‘Once or twice. Sorry for being — back then — the way I was—’

Natalie shakes her head, raises a hand to cut him off — lightly veined now, ring on the finger. ‘It’s not even a thing.’

James has finally, in the last hour, comprehended that their unresolved quarrelling is not a thing — not a living thing — but she says that as though it is.

Mike waits on the landing stage. His best old friend and his best new friend are, it turns out, connected. That this connection runs through the body and soul of Natalie is, today, oddly unsurprising. The launch glides into sight and backs up. Mike nods at the boy, presses a twenty in his hand. At length, Dan and Natalie emerge from the house — their toilet mission accomplished — and negotiate the ramp he’s had fitted to the patio steps.