Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘My husband swam in it,’ she said, ‘but it didn’t do anything for him.’ She paused. ‘He’s dead, in case you’re wondering.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I can’t say I am.’ She laughed. ‘Towards the end, it was —’ She paused to light another cigarette and left the sentence dangling. ‘We never got on very well,’ she went on. ‘We never did see eye to eye about much.’

‘Do you live here alone then?’

She hesitated, as if the question had several answers and she had to choose between them. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I have a son.’

‘I haven’t seen him,’ Loots said.

‘He’s away.’ She tapped her cigarette against the edge of a saucer. We were drinking coffee by then, so weak you could taste the water in it. ‘I had a daughter, but she left. That was twenty years ago.’

Karin, I thought.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there’s just the two of us now. Everybody else is either dead or gone.’

What stayed in my mind, what was still there as I lay in bed, seeing nothing but the window and the rain on it, was the satisfaction in her voice. They were the last words she’d spoken before she left us, and they ran together, they were slightly slurred, but there was none of the self-pity or regret you might have expected. If anything, she seemed to be taking a kind of pleasure in what had happened. She was almost gloating.

After dinner I’d walked down to the pool with Loots. The night was cold and clear. In the moonlight his cheekbones looked more rounded than ever, and polished, too, like bedknobs. He stood on the terrace with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hoisted. He talked about the steam rising off the water, how odd it looked, almost artificial. I thought of Gregory’s bald head.

‘You didn’t mention Nina,’ he said suddenly. ‘You didn’t say you knew her.’

‘No, I know. I’m not sure why. And now it feels too late, somehow.’ I walked across the terrace to the wooden rail that bounded it. ‘Maybe it’ll just come up naturally,’ I said, ‘in conversation.’ I leaned my forearms on the rail. Beyond it, the ground plunged into darkness. In the distance, on the far side of the valley, I saw trees outlined against the sky. The sky was lighter than the trees, the division between the two uneven, serrated, as if a piece of torn black paper had been placed on a piece of paper that was grey. ‘They’re not a very close family,’ I went on, after a while. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t even know that Nina’s missing.’

Loots joined me at the rail. ‘She’s strange.’

‘You think so?’

‘It’s the way she looks at us.’

‘I didn’t notice anything.’

In the silence that followed I could hear the sulphur water rushing along its narrow channel in the rock and tumbling down into the pool. I thought Loots was being dramatic. Her prickly manner had to do with where she lived; it was as natural as a dialect. You couldn’t judge her for it.

‘She’s a country person,’ I told him. ‘You know what country people are like. They’re suspicious. They don’t like strangers.’

‘She runs a hotel.’

‘Yes, but nobody’s stayed here for ages.’

Loots didn’t say anything.

‘There’s just a couple of fucked-up old people to look after,’ I went on. ‘You’d be strange.’

‘Maybe.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

He stepped back from the rail and began to take off his clothes. I asked him what he was doing.

‘I’m going to take the waters,’ he said.

He stripped down to his underpants, which were baggy and misshapen. He was very thin: shoulderblades like triangles (I thought of the signs you see on the back of trucks sometimes, or outside nuclear facilities, the signs that mean CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL). I watched him spring into the air, turn over twice and slide into the water, exactly the kind of acrobatic dive that I would have predicted. There was no need to comment on it. Instead, I asked him what the water was like.

‘Warm,’ he said. ‘Kind of silky, too.’

‘Silky?’

‘Yes. Like there’s oil in it. Are you coming in?’

‘I don’t think so.’

I found a bench and sat down. Loots floated somewhere below me. I’d never liked swimming. Even before I was shot, I didn’t like it. And afterwards, it just got worse. I went swimming at the clinic once. Therapy, they called it. I panicked. It was the four sides of the pool — I didn’t believe they were there. When I stretched a hand out, there’d be no tiles, no ropes — nothing to hold on to. It was like being someone who thought the world was flat: the pool was something I could reach the end of and, when I did, I’d fall over the edge.

‘You’re sure you don’t mind me going tomorrow?’ Loots said.

‘I don’t mind at all. How long will you stay at your uncle’s?’

‘Till Wednesday.’

‘And you’ll come for me on your way back?’

A note of uncertainty must have crept into my voice, because he laughed.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t just leave you here, would I.’

I lay awake on the first floor of the hotel, rain still landing on the window, making the glass look torn. It was Saturday night. Wednesday wasn’t far away. And I had no sense of what might happen after that. I wasn’t sure that returning to the city was such a good idea, and yet I could hardly stay where I was. It was as if I’d found myself in the pool after all. I couldn’t keep swimming indefinitely, but how could I get out if I didn’t trust the edges?

In the morning I walked to the local garage with Loots to buy petrol. A kilometre, Mrs Hekmann had told us, but it was more like three. Loots claimed she’d misled us deliberately, out of some perversity or spite. I disagreed. It was simply that the road was so familiar to her; she thought of it as shorter than it actually was. In the end, it didn’t matter. We enjoyed our walk. Loots described the countryside as we passed through it. There were pine forests, stands of silver birches. There were houses made of wood and painted the same colours as the land, green or brown or yellow, many with carved balconies and eaves. There were farmyards inhabited by geese with orange beaks, and barns weathered to an even grey, the skins of scavengers and rodents nailed to their walls. Loots was more observant than the day before, more specific, his descriptive powers honed, no doubt, by the knowledge that he would soon be gone. Once, though, his voice lifted in genuine excitement as he noticed a cow standing on a frozen stream and drinking from a hole in the ice.

Later, I stood outside the hotel and listened to him drive away. At the last minute he’d asked if I wanted to come with him. It wasn’t too late, he said. I smiled. The truth was, I was eager for him to leave; there was a great impatience in me that I couldn’t have explained. The sound of the car was a shape in the air that slowly sharpened to a point, then sharpened still further, into nothing. It was only then, in the silence, that I felt uncertain. I went up to my room and slept.

When I woke up, it was dark but I thought I had time to stretch my legs before dinner so I put on my overcoat and a pair of gloves, and went downstairs. The hallway was deserted. I opened the front door and stood on the porch. Smoke blew past my face from a chimney somewhere not too far away. The wood they burned in the village had a sweet edge to it and, for a moment, I had the feeling that I’d travelled back in time, that I’d been returned to some much earlier part of my life.

I crossed the road and ducked between the rails of a fence, then climbed down a steep grass bank into a field. Edith Hekmann had told me there was a river at the end of it. I took a few steps, stopped and listened. I thought I could hear the water, though it could have been the wind in the trees. And besides, if that stream the cow was drinking from had frozen over, then maybe the river was frozen, too.