Robbie's Wife (13 page)

She was intent on her story, as if she were back in Cambridge and we weren’t standing in her kitchen anymore.

“It was Robbie, and he came to apologize but she thought he was an idiot for getting drunk before seeing her on stage. She was a principal. I was just a slip of a girl in a crowd of dancers. But I liked the looks of him. I told him if he wouldn’t get sick all over me, I’d go out for a drink with him. He said not to worry, he was pretty much emptied out.”

“You were a bit forward then, too, weren’t you?”

“Not really. I just fancied him and there were all those girls and he was being dumped so he was fair game. If you didn’t strike while the iron was hot, you were out of luck.”

“And you married him?”

“Not that night. He came down to London to see me. I came up to his digs in Cambridge. One thing led to another.”

“And you stopped dancing?”

“Not right away. I stayed with the Rambert and Robbie was at Cambridge but I came up to see him as often as I could. Oh, Jack Stone, we did it in doorways and in his car in car parks and under the stairwell in a lecture hall while some bloke was nattering on about Francis Bacon. We were like rabbits.”

“And then you got married?”

“After a year. I danced for a while longer but I couldn’t keep up the passion for it. Not and be Robbie’s wife.”

She was fingering her hair again, pulling it back so that I could see her cheekbones in sharp relief and I wondered what it would have been like to see her dance. “Do you miss the dance?” I asked.

“At first. You see me in the kitchen peeling potatoes or making tea or mucking out the fridge but you have no idea what I was like when I danced. It was hard work, Jack Stone. Bloody hard work. Tie on those toe shoes and you were in for agony, feet actually bloody at times, but you danced right through the pain, stretched your body until you thought it would break, felt the music in your bones, oh it was, as Robbie would say, fucking brilliant.”

“I wish I had seen you.”

“You might not have liked me, Jack Stone. I didn’t have room for anything else.”

“But you made room for Robbie?”

“He was an alchemist. He could turn lead into silver.”

“Was he teaching at Cambridge?”

“No, he was a student. There I was, shopkeeper’s daughter with the Rambert, and he was a sheep farmer’s son wearing a shiny black gown, but he never got the Oxbridge accent right. And he swore he’d never touch another sheep. I swore I’d never end up like my mum in the kitchen. And here we are.”

“What happened?”

“His Dad had a stroke, we came down to help his mum tend to him and Robbie took over the farm. It was supposed to be temporary, but it didn’t turn out that way. Robbie learned it all over again, the things he saw as a boy, we got Jack and he doubled the flock and his mum was after me to get pregnant. She wanted a grandchild but I was afraid that if I had a baby I would be fixed in stone in her kitchen. His father hung on for another year and then he went and it was as if he pulled her after him. The life went out of her, Jack Stone, and I was terrified.”

“Terrified of what?”

“Of becoming like her. Of having my life defined by my husband.”

“And you had Terry?”

“I didn’t plan on it, but he’s here and I love him dearly. He doesn’t ask me for anything. But maybe that’s part of being ten years old. You haven’t learned yet to make demands. I was thirty when I had him. And this year I turn forty, Jack Stone. I’ll be an old lady.”

“Nonsense.”

“She never saw him.” She began, unconsciously, to braid her hair. “Robbie’s mum. She never saw Terry. She died and we put her in the village cemetery by the church, next to Robbie’s father. There’s a grand view of Eggerton from there. Robbie says it’s as good a spot as any to end up in. And we stayed on. But enough about me. What about you, Jack Stone? Were you always a writer?”

“I think so. When I was a child I made up stories. My father said I was a consummate liar, but I always thought of them as stories about somebody else. I went off to university and ended up teaching for a while, but I grew tired of the pretension, and I wrote a novel that got good reviews and I lived in Los Angeles where it’s all about the movies and somehow I drifted into it.”

“And are you famous in America?”

“No.”

“That’s it? Just, no?”

“That’s it. I made a living and I wrote some things that were, I thought, really good, most of which never saw the light of day, and then everything slowed down. It was as if I were in a movie where the director thought slow motion was a good idea and it suited me, walking slowly, barely conscious of the world around me. Have you ever been to America?”

“No.”

“It’s a strange place, especially where I lived. The sea isn’t anything like it is here. I went down to Chesil Beach the first week I was here. The wind was so strong I could stand on that pile of stones and lean into the wind, spread my arms, almost as if I were flying. It’s much more gentle in California, and the sun shines too much.”

“Oh, god, Jack Stone, if only the sun would shine more here! I would lie naked in the sun until I turned to a crisp!”

She reached across the table, put her hand on my arm, stroking it. Her eyes seemed to look right past me, as if she were talking to someone just beyond my shoulder.

“And you don’t like the sun, do you, Jack Stone?”

“No, I like the sun. But I want it to be an old sun, the kind that fills a sea like the one Odysseus sailed. I spent a week once on the edge of Italy, facing Corsica, and I wrote part of a story on the little terrace that looked out over the Mediterranean that was really good. Nobody took it, but it was good. You would have liked that place, Maggie.”

“You think so, do you? And what do you know about me, Jack Stone?” She looked directly at me.

“Last Spring I went to London,” she said. “One afternoon I put on my coat and took a hundred quid and got on the coach and went to Gillingham and took the train to London. I didn’t leave a note for Robbie or tell anyone, I just left.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. I suddenly felt the kitchen closing in on me and I went outside and the sky was falling and I left. Went away. I went to London and I took a room and I went to the Royal Ballet that night. I wanted to see them dance.”

She stood, rose on her toes as if she were about to dance, then leaned forward to grip the edge of the table. She looked down, talking to the scarred wooden surface.

“They were doing something new, something I didn’t know, and when the lights went down and the dancers came onto the stage I suddenly felt sick. I wanted to throw up. They floated across the stage and I thought, Oh Christ, I’m going to throw up and I tried to rise but my legs wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t fucking work, Jack Stone. I couldn’t stand and I sat there and choked back my vomit and closed my eyes and waited until the end and then, when everyone was gone, an usher helped me to a cab and I got back to the room and the clerk helped me up to the bed and I lay there, my legs numb, and I wanted to die. But I didn’t.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“You don’t know me, Jack Stone!” Her voice was hard and she looked up from the table and she said, “You want to wake up with me at your side in the morning? Is that what you’d like? Well, you’d find another side to me, one you might not like so much!”

She looked back down at the table.

“And then I slept and when I woke my legs worked and I went back to Waterloo and caught a train and came back with my tail between my legs.”

“And Robbie was waiting for you?”

“Robbie never said a word. It was as if I had been here all the time. I came back into this farmhouse and it was as if I had never been gone. Not a word, Jack Stone.”

“Did you tell him where you had gone?”

“He didn’t care where I had gone.”

“Perhaps he knew.”

“No. What he knew was that I would come back. He was sure of that. I could see it in him.”

“You never told him about your legs?”

“I never gave him the satisfaction.”

“So it was the dance that you missed?”

“Do you ever play ‘what if’?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“What if. What if Robbie had shown up sober that night in Cambridge. Would that other girl be living at Sheepheaven Farm and I’d be someone else? Do you ever play that game?”

“Not for a long time.”

“What if the Land Rover turned over and some Dorset copper came to the house and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Barlow, there’s been an accident.’”

“You don’t mean that.”

She stood erect, ran her hands through her hair, stretching it back so that her cheekbones lifted and she turned to me and said, “You’d like to wake in the morning with me at your side, wouldn’t you? Turn over and find your arm across me and hear me breathing and feel the warmth from my body?”

“Is this part of your ‘what if’ game?”

“No. It’s idle chatter. Pay no attention to me. Write it down in one of your movies. You could call it ‘The Mad Housewife of Sheepheaven Farm.’ There’s a hundred thousand women in kitchens just like this who would flock to see it.”

She reached out and took my hand.

“It’s time for that cup of tea, Jack Stone.”

She brushed her hair over her shoulders with her fingers, looking down at me. “Where are we going, Jack Stone? I don’t want any broken hearts.”

She had taken me by surprise, and I hesitated. Suddenly she was asking me something that I had been thinking about the whole time, as if she had read my mind.

“I hadn’t thought about that,” I lied.

“It’s time we thought about it. I think about it. I don’t want anybody to get hurt, not you or me or Terry. I like talking with you, and I like being with you and I like it when you touch me. You like being with me, and you like touching me. That’s obvious, isn’t it? What do you expect, Jack Stone?”

“Just a day at a time. I’ll take whatever I can get. I don’t expect anything more than that. I’ve no right to expect more than that, have I?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t seem to help myself. It’s as if a window is open and the rain is coming and I can’t close the window, it’s stuck, and sometimes I think, just leave the window open and wait for the rain, stand there and get soaked, but I still tug at the window. Do you understand?”

“I understand that I love you.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t expect too much from me. You’ll only be disappointed.” She gathered the tea mugs and went to the sink. I followed her, putting my arms around her waist and she took my hands, carefully removed them and turned to face me. “Not now, Jack Stone. I feel too much like my mum in her kitchen. I can’t dance any more. Go break somebody else’s heart.”

I went off for a walk along the lane. Dense fog covered everything, leaving vague white spaces between trees, fields lost just beyond the hedgerows and the fog sucked up the sound, leaving everything soft and out of focus. I walked toward the village and it was like walking on a treadmill with only the bit of pavement in front of me apparent. Out of the fog came a man bundled in a mac and he passed silently, hands deep in his pockets and when I turned he’d been swallowed by the fog and then a dog trotted past and suddenly there was a magpie flattened on the pavement, as if I were walking in place and the pavement were moving under me. I was struck by the image of a man walking on a treadmill while his life passed under him, and somewhere in front of him a giant hand set things on the treadmill, put a farmhouse B&B there, and then a woman for him to fall in love with and a man who tended sheep and a boy and a dog and four men on bar stools, all of them sliding past, and he must walk steadily or he, too, will be swallowed up by the nothingness behind him. I came to the stone bridge across the stream at the far end of the village and stood there in the fog, the stones of the low bridge wall wet, and there was the small brass plaque set into the wall that read: “Anyone who defaces this bridge will be transported.” Put there, Robbie explained, a hundred years ago when they sent people off to Australia for committing crimes. Oz, he called it. Imagine, he said, some village punk left his initials on the bridge with a spray can last night on his drunken way home and today he’s off to the other side of the world to work at forced labor in an opal mine! That would get his attention!

I tried to think of Maggie in the kitchen and Maggie dancing but all I could conjure was the Maggie who stood before me, dripping, while I toweled her off. I thought about going to the pub and having a beer but I walked on through the village and it was empty, as if there had been a plague and I was the only person left and I walked for several hours, no sense of time passing since there was no sun.

It was late afternoon when I came back to Sheepheaven Farm and Robbie’s Land Rover was in the farmyard. I found him in the shed with a half dozen sheep, several of them sheared. I watched for a while from the doorway, Robbie unaware that I was there, and then went into the house. Maggie and Terry were at the table in the kitchen, and when I came in Maggie said, “Well, Jack Stone, you’ve been gone for a while. I thought maybe you decided to walk back to America.”

“No, I’m still here.”

“So I see.”

I stood for a moment longer and Maggie looked at me, saying nothing, raising the mug of tea to sip at it, and I went upstairs to my room and took off my damp clothes. I sat at the laptop but there was nothing to write and I looked out into the grayness that was descending on the farm and then Maggie was in the doorway again.

“It’s time you left, Jack Stone.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure of anything.”

“If I asked you to go with me, would you?” I already knew the answer to that question.

“No.”

“You know that I’ve fallen in love with you.”

“Yes. I know that. And when I’m around you it’s as if my nerves are exposed, as if my skin is raw and if you were to come closer to me my body would betray me.”

I started to get up but she said, “No. Please don’t.”

“When do you want me to go?”

“Now. This moment. While I still have my resolve.” She turned and was gone and I sat there, wondering what I had done to cause this. I packed my things in the duffel, feeling numb, and I came down the stairs to find Robbie in the kitchen with Maggie and Terry.