Double Vision (22 page)

‘I can’t think why. He must know I’m married.’

‘I haven’t told him.’

‘He knows.’

‘Well, I am nineteen –’

‘More to the point, Mark liked
you
.’

‘Yes, I know. He asked me to go out with him.’

‘Before or after you yelled at him?’

‘After.’

‘Kinky sod. Will you go?’

‘Do you think I should?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘I didn’t think he was all that attractive. Perhaps as a friend…’

‘If he’s a possible friend, you should go. Mind you, I’m not sure that’s what
he
wants.’

‘He’s just finished doing Medicine at Cambridge.’

‘Well, then.’

‘You’re supposed to be jealous.’

‘I’ve no right to be jealous. Have I?’

She didn’t answer. After a few seconds, she rolled over and, in a tense silence, they tried to get to sleep.

He woke the following morning knowing before he opened his eyes that something was wrong. Looking into the mirror as he shaved, his expression was not that conspiratorial self-acceptance he’d found so attractive in Goya’s self-portrait. Far from it. He craned his head back, guiding the razor underneath his chin, and he didn’t like anything he saw.

He made coffee and then took his toast into the living room to watch the television news. Israeli tanks bombarding Jenin. An old woman in a headscarf crying in the ruins of her home. Justine, who seemed to have lost her appetite for fry-ups, peeled and ate an orange.

When the news was over, she said, ‘Dad says you were asking questions about Peter before lunch. Why?’

‘I wanted to hear what he’d say.’

‘He says you kept asking what Peter did.’

He didn’t answer.

‘Whatever it was, he’s been out five years and he hasn’t done it again.’

‘How do you know, if you don’t know what it was?’

‘You don’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt, do you?’

‘Not often.’

‘The truth is, you’ve been digging around in violence so long you can’t see anything else.’

‘I see you.’

‘Do you?’

Stephen sighed. This was a surprisingly married conversation to be having with a girlfriend. It had that intense acrimonious pointlessness that only comes from long years of cohabitation.

‘Why do you do it?’

‘What?’

She jerked her head at the girl who was talking to camera. ‘That. Be a war correspondent.’

‘Foreign.’ The distinction mattered. He was damned if he was going to call himself after an activity he despised.

‘You covered a helluva lot of wars.’

‘They were there to be covered. I didn’t start them.’

‘You know there’s a Barbara Vine book called
A Dark Adapted Eye
? That’s what you’ve got.’

‘Now you’re being silly.’

‘No, I’m not. People get
into
darkness, to the point where it’s the light that hurts.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Why did I do it? Adventure, proving myself, proving I could take it – and once that wore off, which it does, very quickly, being in the know. That sort of thing.’

She was looking at him scornfully.

‘Yeah, OK. I know – pathetic. But why do you think people become doctors? Pure altruism? I don’t think so.’

‘Why, then?’

‘Knowledge. Access to secrets. Power.’

‘Not the only reasons.’

‘There are plenty of good reasons for being a war correspondent. Witnessing. Giving people the raw material to make moral judgements.’

‘But you said yourself, the witness turns into an audience, and then you’re not witnessing any more, you’re disseminating.’

He’d forgotten he’d said that. ‘If you mean, “Was I damaged by it?” Yeah. I don’t think it’s inevitable, I can think of plenty of people who haven’t been, but, yeah, I think I was. Can it be repaired? Some of it. Probably not all of it, but that’s me –’ He turned to face her. ‘Imperfect, messed up, thoroughly unsatisfactory – and you’d better get used to it, sweetheart, because there’s a couple of million more of us out there.’

She stared directly into his eyes, the skin around her own eyes swollen from last night’s tears. ‘You’re getting tired of this, aren’t you?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘What, then?’

‘I’ve always known it can’t last. I accept that. And whenever you go, I won’t try to hold you back. You will go with my blessing.’ That sounded cringe-makingly pompous, but it had to be said.

She nodded. A few minutes later, still silent, she started to get dressed.

At the door, as she was leaving, she said, ‘Oh, I almost forgot. Beth wants to see you.’

‘What about?’

A shrug, and she was gone.

He couldn’t guess what the summons to the farmhouse might be about. If it had anything to do with Justine, he was prepared to hit back. He no longer saw his brother’s wife as the fragile half-erased victim of Robert’s more forceful personality, but as somebody altogether more formidable. But she had no possible right to interfere. Locking the door, deciding that no, he didn’t need to wear a sweater for the quick walk up the lane, he planned what he would say: something about the advisability of taking care of her own family first. Adam was getting a bloody raw deal in this situation, and, if provoked, he was prepared to come right out and say so. At some level, anyway, she must know that.

He walked to the farmhouse along the narrow path that led between high hawthorn hedges bursting into leaf, passed the pond with its rutted edges, green goose
shit everywhere, and the geese themselves hissing and swaying towards him. The back door was open. In the band of sunshine that fell across the stone-flagged floor, there were three pairs of wellingtons, standing side by side, two of them green, the other, smaller pair in navy-blue and red. Once, not so long ago, he’d have felt a twinge of envy.

Beth’s voice came drifting out to him. ‘In here.’

She was in the conservatory. None of the windows was open, and he felt the clammy heat slick his face with sweat before he reached her. She was standing in front of a long table filling pots with compost. There were blue hyacinths blooming in a bowl beside her, spiralling up towards the light. Her fingers were covered with soil. She wiped the sweat away from her upper lip with one freckled forearm and smiled at him.

‘Hello,’ he said, and stood waiting. When nothing, apart from the returned greeting, was forthcoming, he said, ‘What a marvellous colour.’

‘Yes, isn’t it? I like them so much better than the pink ones.’

He waited. She seemed to be finding this difficult.

‘Robert and I were wondering if you’d do something for us?’

‘Of course. Anything I can.’

‘It’s just that, you know we’ve been planning this little trip to Paris? It’s not long, just the three nights, but I’m a bit worried about leaving Justine here on her own. We’ve had a few silent calls, and… well, they’re always a little bit disturbing, aren’t they? You always
think it might be burglars checking to see if you’re in…’

Or one of Robert’s girlfriends trying to reach Robert.

‘I mean, I know she’s nineteen and plenty of girls that age have their own children…’

‘Not ten-year-olds.’

‘No, that’s true. Anyway, we were wondering if you’d step into the breach, as it were.’

‘You mean live in?’ He was enjoying this.

‘Yes, I think it would have to be in. There are plenty of beds.’

‘And Justine would be…?’

‘She’d be here too. And of course she’d take care of Adam during the day, so you wouldn’t have to stop work. Only we’d be happier if you were here at night.’

‘Sounds all right to me. When?’

‘Next weekend. We thought Friday till Monday.’

‘Yes, fine. What brought this on?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She was about to say something bland about the long winter, working too hard… ‘Things aren’t good,’ she seemed to surprise herself by saying.

‘Between you and Robert?’

An embarrassed nod, but then immediately she began to back off. A lot of it was just tiredness, Robert working all hours, she was doing a full-time job… ‘And this is a big place.’ She gazed round her with a hopeless expression, though the house was beautifully kept.

‘You’re obviously happy doing what you’re doing now. The garden…’

‘Yes, but –’

‘I suppose it’s a big place to run on one income.’

‘No, we could afford it, all right. The truth is I think if I were “just a housewife”…’ She was sketching inverted commas in the air as she spoke, but she meant it. ‘…Robert would get bored with me. Correction. Even more bored. You know he’s seeing somebody?’

Everybody, according to Justine. ‘No?’

‘I just wondered if he’d talked to you.’

She didn’t know, she was just guessing. ‘No, and I wouldn’t want him to.’ He hesitated, wishing he hadn’t started this conversation. ‘He won’t leave you.’

‘You mean he won’t leave Adam.’

That was exactly what he’d meant, but he could see she mightn’t find it encouraging. ‘Marriages go through all sorts of phases, Beth. The fact is you chose each other. And that says something about you which is probably still true.’

Stephen was feeling uncomfortable. His only qualification for advising on marriage was having made a mess of his own.

‘You know what I’d really like?’ she said, suddenly brightening. ‘A greenhouse. A big one, the kind they have in nurseries, not one of those fiddly little things. That’s what I really like – plants.’

‘Then go for it. You’re lucky to have a passion like that – most people don’t. And it’d fit in better with Adam.’

‘Oh, Adam’s all right.’

As if summoned, like the devil, by the mention of his
name, Adam appeared in the doorway. Stephen turned to him. ‘You know what, Adam, I think it’s time we went and saw Archie again.’ One of the most successful days he and Justine and Adam had spent together had been at the Bird of Prey Centre. ‘If we’re very nice to Phil, he might let you fly him this time.’

Adam was beaming.

‘Who’s Archie?’ asked Beth.

‘An eagle owl,’ Adam said. ‘He’s huge, isn’t he, Stephen? Bigger than an eagle.’

‘And he’s in love with Phil, isn’t he?’

Adam giggled. ‘He keeps trying to mate with his glove. When can we go?’

‘Next weekend, when Mum and Dad are in Paris.’

‘Right,’ Adam said, and marched up the stairs, not looking back.

Stephen turned and found Beth looking at him with a rather wry expression. She said, ‘It’s very easy, you know, being an uncle.’

‘Oh, I’m sure. Uncles aren’t responsible for how they turn out.’

Twenty-three

And so, that Thursday, after driving Robert and Beth to the airport, Stephen moved some of his things up to the farmhouse and started playing house with Justine. That’s what it felt like – a holiday from adult life. The mere fact that the house was not his gave him an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling. He seemed to be wandering around between the chair legs while items of furniture loomed above him, mysterious with withheld significance. They made him feel insubstantial, these rooms with their carefully selected antiques, the fruits of years of settled, successful endeavour, and yet the feeling was not entirely unpleasant. Like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears, he had a sense of danger and transgression. He and Justine cooked meals for themselves and Adam, and sat down at the long table in the kitchen to eat them, and there was always this feeling of innocence and danger combined.

It was a happy time. He felt as irresponsible and carefree as Adam, or rather as Adam would have felt if he’d been a different sort of child. But even Adam seemed to feel liberated. He flew Archie, and Stephen took photographs of the moment when the eagle owl landed on his glove. Adam’s face was screwed up in fear, braced to take the weight, then amazed, as the
great wings settled and folded and the golden eyes turned on him, that the bird was so light.

Stephen had the photos developed in Sainsbury’s, bought frames and hung them on the wall of Adam’s room.

They lived an old-fashioned circa 1950s family life, playing Monopoly in the evenings, going for walks in the forest, feeding the deer, running Adam to the point of exhaustion on the sands. His ambition, he told Stephen, was to have a dog.

‘Well, why not?’ Stephen said.

‘Because there’s nobody here in the day. It’d be cruel.’

‘What’s cruel,’ Stephen said, as he and Justine sat by the fire that evening, after Adam had gone to bed, ‘is the entire situation. I mean, if Beth was desperate to be a hospital administrator, fine, but she isn’t. She’d far rather be at home with the garden. That’s what she really wants to do, and if she did that, Adam could have his dog.’

‘Yes,’ Justine said. ‘But there’s no status in it.’

‘There is. I’d respect her for it.’

‘Robert’s friends wouldn’t. Or anyway she thinks they wouldn’t.’

‘It shouldn’t matter what they think.’

‘But it does. She’s terrified of being a stay-at-home mum, that’s all.’

‘So what’s your solution?’

‘Don’t have kids.’

‘It’s a bit late for that – he’s ten. Seriously.’

She shrugged. ‘If I ever had one, I’d like to think I could stay at home and take care of it myself and not
feel I was making some kind of inferior choice. It’s quite old-fashioned, that idea that all your status comes from work.’

Oh, the joys of being nineteen. Everything’s so easy.

‘It’s about sex, though, isn’t it? She thinks if she’s not out there, she’ll lose him.’

‘She’s lost him anyway. Sexually.’

Stephen wanted to press her for more information – he felt she knew more than she was saying – but he didn’t think he should. Her outburst in the kitchen after Sunday lunch had been driven by her own unhappiness and he knew she regretted it. He wondered how she knew, but then remembered she had a friend in the medical school where Robert taught. It might be no more than student gossip. The private lives of lecturers never lose anything in the telling. But he couldn’t ask. ‘Come on,’ he said, standing up. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

Bed had become the place they went to sleep. Partly he felt inhibited having sex in his brother’s house – almost as if Robert had taken on the role of parent – but also, his relationship with Justine was changing in ways he didn’t understand. Whatever the reason, during that long weekend, there was no attempt at love-making until the final night.