Double Vision (14 page)

Once or twice she talked about it, the affair she’d had last summer after A-levels, how shocked she’d been
when the young man dumped her. No warning. She’d thought everything was all right, and then one evening he’d said, ‘I don’t think this is working.’ Her eyes filled with tears as she said it, and she rubbed her wet cheek on his shoulder. ‘Why do you think he thought that?’ Stephen asked. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think he ever meant it to be permanent. It was just for the summer.’

She gave no further details, but she returned to the subject again and again, and always, whenever she mentioned it, her eyes filled with tears.

There’s an old saying that a man is only as old as the woman he feels, but Justine made him feel ancient. He wanted to say, ‘Look, this time next year you’ll be in love with somebody else. You won’t be able to remember what you saw in him.’ And when you’re my age, he thought sadly, you won’t even remember who he was. He didn’t say any of that. Instead he watched her face, blind and groping through pain, and thought that all this so-called wisdom was useless, because it couldn’t be conveyed without sounding patronizing. And perhaps he was being patronizing. No, patronizing wasn’t the right word, he cared too much about her for that. Paternal, that was more like it.

They went to bed and made love, and for once he saw her, or part of her, the shadows of clouds dissolving and re-forming over her breasts. He groaned and clutched her hips, grinding her pelvis into his, throwing his head back and baring his teeth as he came.

Nope, paternal wasn’t the right word either.

*

After ten days of intensely hard work, bending over the computer until his eyes burned, Stephen began to find the cottage unbearably claustrophobic. The fact was that Justine had insinuated herself into his living space. Not his work space, but almost everywhere else. She rearranged objects, tidied up, washed up, vacuumed the carpets. He never protested, except once when he found her ironing his shirts and told her roughly to stop being a doormat.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, flushing. ‘Dad’s pretty helpless, and –’

‘I’m not.’

It might have been better if they’d gone out more, but she didn’t want to go out. If he suggested a meal in a restaurant, or a drink, she always referred to some parishioner of her father’s who was sure to be there. ‘So what?’ he felt like saying. She was single; he was, if not single, at least separated from his wife. It was nobody else’s business.

When he finally stopped work in the evening, they watched television, like an old married couple. It was strange watching news bulletins, or programmes like
Panorama
that in the past he’d often contributed to, but he soon found that Justine disliked them anyway.

‘Why won’t you watch the news?’ he asked. It staggered him, this indifference to what was going on in the world.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t see the point. There’s nothing I can do about it. If it’s something like a famine, OK, you can contribute, but with a lot of this there’s nothing
anybody can do except gawp and say, “Ooh, isn’t it awful?” when really they don’t give a damn. It’s all pumped-up emotion, it’s just false, like when those families come on TV because somebody’s gone missing, or thousands of people send flowers to people they don’t know. It’s just
wanking
.’

That last word was the give-away. ‘But you can’t have a democracy if people don’t know what’s going on.’

‘You can read the papers. It’s the voyeurism of
looking
at it, that’s what’s wrong. Do you know, some people never watch the news, on principle?’

‘I don’t know how
people
tell the difference between principle and just being too fucking self-centred to care.’

The long hours alone with Justine, in bed and out of it, had the unexpected effect of waking him up sexually. Like Cleopatra, but rather earlier in life, she made hungry where most she satisfied. Now, as he walked through the streets of Newcastle on his way back from the university library to his car, he noticed every woman he passed. The sensation was almost painful, like blood flowing back into a numbed limb.

The sky was a deep turquoise, and the starlings were beginning to gather, huge folds and swathes of them coiling, spiralling, circling, and everywhere their clicks and chatterings, as insistent as cicadas. Beneath this frenzy, another frenzy of people rushing home from work, shopping; young people setting off for a night out; girls, half naked, standing in shop doorways; young men in short sleeves, muscular arms wreathed in blue,
green, red and purple, dragons and serpents coiled round veined biceps. He passed a gaggle of girls, the pink felt penises on top of their heads bobbing about in the wind that blew up from the Quayside. Perhaps he gaped too obviously, for one of them turned round and stuck two fingers in the air.

He walked through all this, muffled up against the weather, sensible, middle aged and cautious, but also, as the blue light deepened and the girls became lovelier, racked with lust. He stopped at the foot of Grey’s Monument, craning to look up, while thousands of starlings broke in waves above his head and a few stars pricked through the darkening sky.

Standing here like this, in his dark mac among the half-naked boys and girls, he looked, he suspected, not merely middle aged but furtive. The man in the park peering up the skirts of little girls on the swings. He needed a drink, and that was a problem because he had the car with him. And yet he didn’t want to go tamely back home with a bottle as he had on previous nights. Not bloody likely. He looked around for a wine bar – he could have one drink, for God’s sake, there was no harm in that, and even one at the moment felt like a life-saver, softening his mood, dissolving the hard edges of memory so that he could flow into the lives around him.

And then he saw Peter Wingrave, standing in the doorway of Waterstone’s, obviously waiting for somebody, a girl, probably. Or perhaps not. He watched Peter watching the crowds and saw an echo of his own
loneliness, his own desperation. It was enough. Peter glanced up as soon as he realized he was being directly approached, with a face prepared for strangers, cautious, polite, ready to take evasive action, balanced on the balls of his feet. Excessively cautious, surely. Stephen could well believe it might get rough a bit later in the evening, but not now.

‘Hi,’ Stephen said.

A flash of recognition, succeeded almost immediately by a dull flush. Now why? Because he’s on the pick-up, on the prowl, or perhaps not even that. Perhaps just ashamed of being alone. He was very attractive-looking underneath the nerdy specs and the designer stubble, but you couldn’t see him fitting in easily with his contemporaries, though he knew nothing about him, really. He had no grounds for thinking that. Peter might be the linchpin of a thriving social network, for all he knew. Good looks, intelligence, charm… And something else, something that undermined them all.

‘Mr Sharkey.’

‘Stephen.’ Despite Peter’s confident use of the name, he seemed uncertain. ‘We met at Kate’s studio.’

‘Yes.’ He was glancing from side to side, as if looking for a way out of the encounter. But when Stephen suggested a drink, his gaze immediately focused on Stephen’s face and after only a second’s hesitation he said, ‘Yes.’

They went to a wine bar a few hundred yards down the street. It was crowded, but not with the kind of young people who were walking past outside. This was
job-related drinking, people disguising from each other the fact that they had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, clinging to this extended version of the working day because outside it they didn’t exist.

Or because they love their jobs, he reminded himself, remembering how much he’d loved his.

A man with a roll of pink fat overlapping his collar was speaking urgently into a mobile phone, a finger blocking out the din from his other ear. They had to push their way past him to get to the bar. Stephen was sweating, though outside he’d been cold in spite of the coat. Peter asked for a whisky. Stephen bought him a double, himself a single, and stood pinned against the bar, wondering why he was doing this. Glancing at Peter, Stephen saw him looking round, searching the faces round the bar, and, as he leant closer to speak to him, he caught a whiff of sweat, fresh, but not the normal scent of a healthy body reacting to heat. He’d always meant to ask somebody – Robert might know – why fear sweat smells different from ordinary sweat. It certainly did. An intimate acquaintance with his own armpits in various sticky situations had taught him that. And yet these people were, what? Accountants? Lawyers? Not the kind of people to tear strangers in their midst limb from limb. But at least he now knew why Peter interested him – had done from the moment he walked into the studio. Something was wrong, something didn’t fit, and Stephen’s nose for a story was twitching.

It was hard to get a conversation going. Partly the
noise, partly his own state of mind. When he’d been working as hard as he had recently a kind of verbal dislocation set in, in which it was hardly possible to string another sentence together, and names of even very common everyday objects escaped him. He’d hear himself say ‘thingy’ or ‘whatsit’. It had irritated the hell out of Nerys, but then so had everything else he did, in the end.

‘Have you been working for Kate long?’

‘No, just a few weeks. It’s useful because gardening dries up in the winter months.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember. You’re a gardener.’

‘I’ve done a lot of gardening.’

‘But it’s not what you want to do?’

‘No, I want to be a writer.’

Oh, God. No wonder he’d been so keen on coming for a drink. He was on the lookout for contacts, agents, publishers. Stephen was already working out a cast-iron excuse for why he couldn’t read whatever it was Peter’d written.

It’s a haiku
.

I really am pressed for time at the moment
…

‘Have you had anything published?’ An unkind question, perhaps, but then he wasn’t trying to be kind.

‘A couple of stories in
New Writing
. I did an MA in creative writing.’ He winced fastidiously, forestalling Stephen’s reaction. ‘And the Writer in Residence sent them off to the editors and…’ He shrugged. ‘They accepted them.’

‘You don’t sound very pleased.’

‘To be honest, I wish I’d had the guts to say no.’

The bar had suddenly become less crowded as a group of people left together. Stephen waved Peter across to a table. It was a relief not to have to shout and, tucked away in a corner like this, Peter seemed to relax. ‘Why’s that?’ he asked, as they settled at a table. ‘I thought it was quite prestigious. A showcase.’

‘Yes, but unless you’re Damien Hirst, you don’t want to put a dead sheep in it.’

Stephen took this to be mock modesty, and it made him impatient. ‘C’mon, they can’t be that bad.’

‘You know that poem, I can’t remember the words, something about using the snaffle and the curb, but where’s the bloody horse?’ He looked charming, modest, vulnerable. Self-mocking. ‘They’re a bit like that. Equine deficiency syndrome?’

‘Do you think there’s a cure?’

‘Oh, no, I shouldn’t think so.’ His voice had gone flat, as if he’d stumbled into talking more seriously than he’d intended. ‘Terminal.’

‘I’d like to read them.’ As if to explain this unusual desire to himself, Stephen went on, ‘Too much control. It’s an unusual fault in a young writer.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is. If you give me your address, I’ll let you have them. If you really mean it?’

‘Of course I do,’ Stephen said, already regretting it. ‘How are you finding the job with Kate?’

‘Fascinating.’

‘Have you found out how it turns into bronze?’

‘More or less. I’m still not sure I understand it.
Nothing you actually touch appears in the finished product, I know that much.’

‘Does she talk about what she’s doing?’

‘Not really – sometimes when we’re having coffee she’ll say something, but mainly it’s just, “Where’s the chisel?” “I need more plaster.”’ He was smiling, but his eyes were alert. Perhaps he’d detected more interest from Stephen than he could account for. ‘You knew her husband?’

‘Yes, we were in Bosnia together. And various other places. Round and about.’

‘Rwanda?’

‘For a while.’

‘Afghanistan?’

‘Briefly.’

‘I’ve seen some of his photographs.’

He didn’t say any of the things people normally say, and Stephen was grateful for that. It was the last thing he wanted to talk about. ‘Have you tried your hand at a novel yet?’

‘Ye-es, but I don’t know… I’m quite attracted to writing screenplays.’

‘More money?’

‘Less publicity. You can be quite successful and still not be well known.’

‘That’s an advantage?’

‘For me it is.’

‘You’d be quite good at it, though. Publicity.’

Peter shrugged.

‘You don’t like the idea?’

‘It’s a perversion. It should be the work.’

‘Isn’t that a bit ivory tower? They’ve got to sell the stuff somehow. It’s the marketing people who matter these days. USPs.’

Peter looked puzzled.

‘Unique Selling Points. What’s your Unique Selling Point, Peter?’

‘I’m not sure I’ve got one.’ He reached into his pocket for a packet of cigarettes. ‘I suppose this is all right?’ he asked, looking round.

‘I think so. There’s somebody smoking over there.’

He coughed as he inhaled.

‘Have you ever been in the army?’

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘I just wondered. I’ve got a theory you can tell if somebody’s lived in an institution.’

‘And you think I have?’

Stephen shrugged. ‘I think it’s probably true of me. Boarding school, in my case.’

‘Yeah, well, snap.’

‘Which one?’

‘You wouldn’t have heard of it.’

He was tightening up. Why the fear of publicity? He had youth, good-looks, charm. Given a modicum of talent, or preferably a great big chunk of talent, he was there.

‘Anyway,’ Stephen said, ‘I look forward to reading the stories.’

‘Do you have an agent?’