Double Vision (23 page)

Beth had just rung to confirm that she and Robert would be back home late the following morning. She sounded eager to be back, though whether that meant the break had been a failure or a brilliant success wasn’t clear. Justine put down the phone and said, ‘That’s it, then.’

He felt both relieved and sad. The smell of logs burning in the grate brought an autumnal melancholy into the spring evening. They went on talking for a while, but they were both tired. She started getting ready for bed. He stood on the steps for a minute before locking the door, looking up at the clear, brilliant stars, and then, awed and dismayed, scuttled back inside, turned the keys and rattled the chain into place.

She was waiting for him in the bedroom, beside the big double bed, reflected in the mirror on the wall behind her. ‘Better close the curtains,’ he said, though there was nobody to see except the owls, who seemed to hoot less on these spring nights, that, or the leaves muffled the sound. She went to the window and leant out. He followed, put his arms around her from behind, cradling her breasts in his hands, burying his face in the sweet-smelling hair at the nape of her neck.

A sound made him look up. He stood listening for any sound of movement from Adam’s room. This is what it’s like to be a parent, he thought. It amazed him there weren’t more only children in the world. He couldn’t rest until he’d put on his dressing-gown and looked in on Adam, who was curled up under the covers, only the top of his head visible. ‘Fast asleep,’ he said, coming back into the bedroom, but the mood had been broken. Justine closed the curtains and got into bed. He slipped off the dressing-gown and lay beside her.

Moonlight made a pale oblong on the polished wood
floor. Under the door was a line of yellow from Adam’s night light. Somewhere on the roof a bird’s feet scratched. Stephen was taking quick, shallow breaths as much from oppression as desire. He put his hand on her firm flat stomach, marvelling at the solidity of her, the warmth. All around them the house sighed and creaked. In the room next door moonlight flooded through the open curtains on to the white-lace counterpane of Robert and Beth’s bed, the hollows in the pillows where their heads had rested still visible though they were far away. He was thinking about Nerys, a vague memory of their early marriage when they’d been in love, happy and innocent, though perhaps they’d never been that. It was hard to remember now.

‘What’s the matter?’ Justine asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘You want this to end, don’t you?’

‘I’ll be glad when they’re back.’

‘No, I meant this. Us.’

‘No, that’s not true. I suppose I want to stop being in limbo. I want something to happen.’

‘What?’ A cool, almost hostile tone. She was looking deep into the pupil of one eye, the lover’s gaze, but there was nothing intimate in her expression. She looked like an entomologist who’s just found the wrong number of spots on an insect’s backside.

‘I don’t know. Anyway, it’s too soon to think about it. I haven’t finished the book yet.’

He didn’t want to talk about this or to talk at all. He reached up and touched the side of her face, then pulled
her head down towards him. Her nipples brushed his chest, and –

Adam stood in the door. ‘I want a drink of water.’

Justine lay back, trying not to laugh. ‘Go and get one, then. I’ll come and see you when you’re in bed.’

She was gone five minutes. When she returned, Stephen said, ‘Is he asleep?’

‘Is he hell.’

After a while she closed her eyes. He continued to lie as before, listening to her breathing until he was sure from its depth and steadiness that she must be asleep. He lay, tumescent and sleepless, feeling a stab of nostalgia for the cottage, which he missed, though it was only 200 yards away.

He’d just managed to erase the last sexual fantasy from his brain and was settling down to sleep, when, with an enormous whale-like heave of the bedclothes, Justine changed position and, still sleeping, thrust her cool, lordotic arse into his groin.

Oh, Justine. Justine. He turned, cautiously, the other way, thrusting his aching pole into space. Only after an uncomfortable hour spent clinging to the edge of the mattress, fantasies of riotous, Adam-free sex seething and bubbling in his brain, did he finally manage to get off to sleep.

Twenty-four

Monday morning. In six hours Robert and Beth would be back home. Waking, Stephen threw his arm across the empty space and was ambushed by a sense of loss. He thought about Kate waking every morning without Ben beside her. There was no possible comparison, of course, between his momentary missing of Justine’s warmth and Kate’s loss. He was startled that he’d even made the comparison.

Justine was in the kitchen, fully dressed, frying bacon. Adam, in school uniform, sat slumped at the table, white-faced, bent over, complaining of tummy ache. Justine put a bacon sandwich, normally his favourite food, in front of him.

‘I’m a vegetarian,’ he said, pushing it away.

‘Since when?’ Justine demanded.

‘Since now.’

‘Why now?’

‘Why not now?’

‘C’mon, Adam, eat up,’ Stephen said.

Adam was clutching his stomach. ‘I’ve got tummy ache.’

‘He does look very white,’ Stephen said.

‘He’s like this every Monday.’

Stephen sat down beside him. ‘Adam, why don’t you want to go to school?’

A shrug.

‘There must be a reason.’

‘Everybody thinks I’m weird.’

‘Now why do you think they think that?’

‘Because I am weird.’

Stephen was left wondering whether insight was really such a good thing. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to eat?’

An exaggerated wet-dog shake of the head.

Justine cleared his plate away without comment. ‘Mum and Dad’ll be here when you get back, think of that.’

Adam trailed after her to the car and climbed – slow-motion – into the back seat.

‘Fasten your seat belt, Adam,’ Justine said.

‘I can’t. It hurts my tummy.’

‘The car won’t start till you fasten the belt.’

A bit of an empty threat, that, Stephen thought, since Adam didn’t want the car to start.

‘Adam,’ he said, bending into the car. ‘If you go to school without making a fuss I’ll take you to fly Archie this Friday after school. How’s that?’

Justine mouthed at him over the roof of the car. ‘I can’t believe you did that.’

‘What?’

‘Bribed him.’

‘Promise?’ Adam called from the back seat.

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ He caught Justine’s
eye as she got into the driver’s seat. ‘I’m allowed to be irresponsible. I’m only an uncle.’

She smiled. ‘Are you staying here?’

‘No, I thought I’d go back to the cottage and get some work done. What about you?’

‘I’ve got some shopping to do for Beth.’

‘Right, then, see you later.’

It was a matter-of-fact leave-taking, he thought, as he went back into the farmhouse. They might have been married for years.

Quickly, he tidied up the spare bedroom, put the sheets into the laundry basket, did a quick check to make sure he hadn’t left any personal belongings behind and then let himself out of the farmhouse and walked quickly down the lane to the cottage. Inside, it smelled cold and musty, even after an absence of only three nights. He lit the fire, switched on the computer and tried to work.

On Friday he’d broken off in the middle of a discussion about the bombardment of Baghdad in 1991 – the first war to appear on TV screens as a kind of
son et lumière
display, the first where the bombardment of enemy forces acquired the bloodless precision of a video game. He’d found it disconcerting at the time, and still did. What happens to public opinion in democracies – traditionally reluctant to wage war – when the human cost of battle is invisible? Of course there was nothing new in strict wartime censorship: it had been imposed in both world wars. But, in the first, nothing could hide the arrival of the telegrams nor, in the second, the
explosion of bombs. What had been new about Baghdad and later Belgrade was the combination of censorship with massive, one-sided aerial bombardment so that allied casualties were minimal or non-existent and ‘collateral damage’ couldn’t be shown. These were wars designed to ensure that fear and pain never came home.

But he was finding it difficult to get started. Walk. Walk first. A walk would freshen him up. He decided to take his usual route to the top of the hill, though it was a long walk, longer than he really had time for. At first he tried to jog, the grass he ran through flashing fire as his trainers shook off drops of dew. The sky a clear, translucent blue, and far away on the horizon a plane with the sunlight glinting on its wings had left twin vapour trails behind it, spreading out, thinning, fading to nothingness, though, whether from distance or some trick of the landscape, no sound reached him.

He turned to look back at the cottage and the farmhouse far below. Very small and square, they looked, like Monopoly houses. A white van had pulled into the farmyard – visible from here, though it couldn’t be seen from the lane – and two men were carrying something out of the back door. A television set. He wondered for one brain-dead moment whether Beth had arranged for it to be collected and forgotten to tell him, but how had they got in? No, it was a burglary. And then he saw Justine’s little red Metro travelling along the lane. He prayed for it to stop outside the cottage – it was possible she’d call in for a coffee before taking the shopping up to the farmhouse – but no, she drove straight past
without slackening speed, and pulled up outside the farmhouse, which to her would look normal. There’d be nothing to see from the lane. He hadn’t remembered to set the burglar alarm, so there’d be no flashing or ringing. He saw her get out and lean for a moment on the car roof, looking up at the hill. She was looking straight at him. He waved his arms and yelled, ‘Justine!’, but she couldn’t hear him, any more than he’d heard the car’s engine.

He started to run, hurling himself headlong down the hill, tripping over tussocks, catching his feet, and knowing all the time that, even if he ran till his heart and lungs burst, he still wouldn’t get there in time.

Justine leant on the car roof, feeling the metal warm under her bare arms and looked up at the hill and the twin vapour trails from a plane dispersing in the blue sky. Then she heaved the carrier bags out from the back seat and set off up the path.

The daffodils were at their peak, though Beth, who for some reason disapproved of yellow flowers, had restricted them to a single clump by the door.
You’re vulgar, you are
, she told them as she reached for her key.
You should be silver-grey or white
. And then, rejoicing in the unsubtlety of daffodils, she carried her bags along to the kitchen and dumped them on the table. Coffee, before she unpacked. Looking out of the window, she saw that the vapour trails had almost disappeared.

Then a scurry of footsteps, a blow between her shoulder blades and an arm coiled round her neck.
Stephen, she tried to say. There was a second when she actually believed this was Stephen, not because it was the kind of thing he would do, but because the other explanation was unthinkable. DON’T LOOK, YOU FUCKING STUPID CUNT. The words burst on her ear in a spray of spit. Fingers poked into her eyes. A hand pressed hard into her nose and mouth. Can’t breathe. She threw herself back against him, trying to take him by surprise. He grunted and started hitting her, big flat-handed blows, not like a man or even a woman, more like a toddler batting something away, trying to make it
not there
. Now that her mouth was free, she drew in breath with a screech and expelled it in a scream. DON’T TURN ROUND. I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING STUPID COW. Frustrated, he began banging her head against a cupboard, cutting her forehead and scalp on the sharp edge. She felt a gush of blood down her face and neck. Huge red splashes appeared on her white T-shirt, dropped like rain on to her arms and hands. Plenty more where that came from. The meaningless thought formed and hung suspended in the darkness. Another roar of rage from him – he was angry with her for being hurt. She focused on him so intently she anticipated his every reaction. He had become the world. She was no longer afraid, or not in the way she’d previously understood fear. Her whole being had shrunk to a single diamond-hard point of determination to live. He thrust her forward against the sink till it cut into her stomach. The pain steadied her. She made a rumbling noise behind the hand, trying to
tell him she couldn’t breathe. DON’T LOOK AT ME. SHUT UP. DON’T TURN ROUND. He banged her against the sink with every word, his anger feeding off her fear. She went limp, pretending to faint, then, judging his height from the direction of his voice, drove her right elbow into his stomach. A grunt of pain. Then he swung her round and she found herself staring into two pale blue eyes thickly fringed with lashes that were almost white. He hit her, hard, and the middle of her face exploded in pain. There was just time to think, He’s going to kill me, and then she was fainting, crumpling to the floor. She was aware of being dragged into the living room, the carpet leaving burn marks on her back where her T-shirt had ridden up. Two figures now, two voices, but the new one was careful to stay out of sight. They picked her up and threw her on to the sofa, and then she must have blacked out again, but not completely. She was aware of them talking, trying to solve the problem. She’d seen one of them. She could describe him. They couldn’t solve it just by running away. She went on playing dead. Even with her eyes closed she knew exactly where they were, as if some part of her mind had split off and was watching what happened from somewhere else in the room. She could see herself lying on the sofa, a hand over her face, snuffling blood and mucus.

Creeping along behind the hedge, Stephen did a bent-double, lung-bursting run along the path and into the kitchen garden. From here he could see the house
through a gap in the hedge. The sunlight flashed on the conservatory windows, but there were no figures moving around inside. Adam had shown him where Beth kept the spare key: incredibly for an intelligent woman, she left it under a stone urn outside the conservatory door. Woodlice scrambled away in all directions as he found the small polythene envelope and took the key out. He slid it into the lock, holding his breath as it turned, praying he wouldn’t make any noise getting in. Running down the hill, he’d thought he might burst into the house shouting, ‘Police’, hoping they’d panic and run, but if they didn’t he’d have lost the element of surprise. And they might be upstairs in one of the bedrooms. It mightn’t be so easy for them to run. But he daren’t think about that. Through the door, across the black-and-white tiles, into the hall. On a table there was a bronze statue of an African man, immensely tall and thin. Stephen picked it up, held it round the legs and edged forward again. Voices, though he couldn’t catch any of the words. Deep, slow breaths. It hurt his chest to breathe like that, but he did it. Peering round the edge of the door, he saw Justine lying on the sofa, her face a mask of blood, and, only a few feet away, his back to the door, a man wearing a dark blue sweatshirt and jeans. Stephen could see short, ginger hair, the nape of a pink neck. He raised the statue, took two long strides into the room, and brought it crashing down. At the last second somebody shouted, ‘Look out’ and the man ducked, deflecting the blow on to his shoulder. Stephen felt the jar of bone breaking
travel up his own arm, and then, howling, the man turned and ran.