Robbie's Wife (14 page)

“What’s this, Jack? You leaving us?”

“Yes. You’ve got enough on your hands without me to get in your way.”

“You’re no trouble, Jack. And it’s late. Where are you off to? You can stay tonight at no charge, get off to an early start tomorrow. Right, Mags?”

“Let mister Stone decide for himself, Robbie.”

“You’re sure, Jack?”

“I’m sure, Robbie.” But, of course, I wasn’t sure. It had all happened so quickly, as if a wind had come up and slammed shut a door quite unexpectedly, and I looked at Maggie, hoping for some sign that I should stay, but she turned and left the kitchen.

“It’s time I moved on, Robbie.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. “It’s been good having you. Terry,” he said, turning to the boy, “say goodbye to Mr. Stone.”

Terry looked up from his copybook.

“Goodbye sir,” he said.

“Did your essay on the Roman forts turn out okay?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good. Then I’ll be going.”

Robbie shook my hand, wished me well. I said I hoped the trouble with the foot-and-mouth would be over soon. Robbie assured me that they’d survive.

And I left Sheepheaven Farm.

I looked back as I went out the gate but Maggie was nowhere to be seen, only Robbie trudging off toward the shed, Jack at his heel. My first thought was to drive up to London, but I turned toward the coast and in less than an hour I was in Lyme Regis. It was getting dark and I looked for a place to stay, found a cheap bed-and-breakfast on a side street and had fish and chips at a takeout not far from there. I spent a fitful night in a tiny room with chintz curtains and heard the rain come back while I lay thinking of Maggie.

The next morning I had breakfast at a little table in a glass conservatory off the kitchen of the house, the rain sheeting down overhead, and it was the usual eggs and a rasher of fatty bacon and cold toast. I put my duffel in the car and sat at the wheel looking at the map and then I found a phone box and telephoned Sheepheaven Farm. I couldn’t just drive off and not see her again, and when she answered, there was a pause after I said, “Maggie? It’s Jack.”

I wondered if she would hang up.

But she didn’t. I wanted her to come down to Lyme and have lunch with me, I said. It wasn’t right to just walk out of the house without even a goodbye, and I wasn’t going to go anyplace until she at least talked to me and she said she didn’t trust herself to just talk to me and I said we’ll meet in a cafe and have a sandwich and tea and it’s terribly important to me. Please, please, I thought as I waited for her answer and then she said yes, she would come down, where should we meet. Across the street was a little cafe and I gave her the name of it and the street and said I would wait there for her.

After she hung up I found I was sweating, as if I had run a great distance, and I looked at my watch and thought, what will I do to make the next four hours run quickly.

Maggie showed up at noon, ducking into the little cafe, her hair wet, and when she took off her mac I could see that she was wearing a gray sweater and gray tailored trousers and I felt a rush of excitement. But lunch went slowly, talk of Robbie and sheep and Terry and what I would do next and finally she said she needed to go back to the farm. We had skirted around everything important.

She leaned forward, pulled her hair off her shoulder and twisted it around her finger, then tossed it back over her shoulder and, raising her hands to the sides of her head, combed her fingers through her hair, pulling it back, accentuating her cheekbones.

“I think,” I began.

She touched her elbows to the table, hands holding her face, smiling. “You think what?”

“I think,” I began again and I realized I didn’t know where the sentence would end. There were times when, after I left her, I would talk to myself, finishing sentences I meant to say to her, sentences I rehearsed when she wasn’t there, important things I wanted to share with her, questions that needed answers, feelings I wanted to put into words and now I wasn’t sure of what it was that I was going to say, only that I knew that after she was gone I would want to call her back, tell her wait, wait, there’s more. There’s always more.

“I think that this past week has been the most important week in my life. You have no idea how much I love you.”

The smile faded. She studied me, said quietly, “I love you, too.”

I knew there was more I wanted to say and she could feel it and she said, “And?” and waited, watching me. I found myself rearranging the fork next to my plate, smoothing the paper napkin, and I was aware of the couple at the next table talking.

“I want you all the time,” I said.

Her face went flat. “Where was all of this going?” she said. “What did you expect of us?”

“I’ve told you I have no right to expect anything more than a day at a time. I don’t expect anything more,” and she said, “Good. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I wanted it to be a lark to see you and talk to you but I can’t seem to stop myself. You need to go away from me and Sheepheaven Farm. You need to leave me alone, Jack Stone.”

And I said, “Don’t worry,” but I lied because by then I had already been caught up. She had thrown magic dust at me and I was bewitched. I understood how the prince picked Cinderella out of all those girls. It wasn’t because she was the prettiest of the girls in the court. It was because she danced with him and pressed her body against his and whispered in his ear what she wanted him to do to her and her voice must have had the same bright insistence that they could do anything together and he would live forever and she would listen to his secrets and tell no one else. And I lied when I told her not to worry, that I wouldn’t get hurt, because I was hurting at the thought of not seeing her and now her eyes were filling and I knew if she cried I would cry, too, so I said, “Don’t you dare,” and she smiled and I knew that once again I had lied. I pretended everything was okay when what I really wanted to do was lean across the table and say, “I can’t stand the idea of not seeing you, of not talking to you, a great basket of secrets lies inside me that I want to tip out and sort through with you and I want your secrets, too, and I want to wake in the morning and see you sleeping next to me and I want to fuck you and stand naked with you, leaning into the wind on Chesil Beach.”

But I didn’t.

I knew very little about her yet I thought I knew her well, as if I knew things about her that she had never told me. I wanted to hold her tightly.

The waitress came with the bill, waited while I dug in my pocket and I put down a ten pound note, far too much but I told her to keep the change because Maggie had risen from the table and was on her way out the door. I caught up with her and the bright sun reflected off the windows of the buildings along the quay. We walked the two blocks to the car park in silence.

It was dark in the car park and we stood at the side of the Land Rover and kissed and she pressed against me and I wanted to press hard against her, let her feel my growing hardness, but she opened the door and was suddenly behind the wheel, saying “Goodbye, Jack Stone. Write and tell me everything you’re doing. Please don’t forget me.” And I knew that after she had gone I would wonder why I did not touch her, feel her breasts, run my hands down her hips, press my fingers into her, just as every time we parted I wished we had done other things; that I had said the words that lay in the back of the drawer, unspoken.

I turned and walked back down the ramp, deliberately not watching her drive off, aching, wanting to call her back, wanting to shout wait! I want to tell you everything. I want us to cling together like leeches! I want you to wait while I find the words!

I spent that night in the same B&B. It was another restless night and the next morning Mrs. Salt, the proprietor, asked me, as she set the plate of fried eggs and bacon in front of me, “Are you all right, love? You look peaked.” She pronounced it “peek-ed,” the same way my aunt pronounced it when I was a child.

I packed my bag and sat in the car again, looking at the map, but I didn’t drive off to London. I went back to the cafe where Maggie and I had lunch and I had a cup of tea and a biscuit. I was becoming English, I thought, and remembered Maggie’s words the first afternoon I had come down into her kitchen about tea and the English.

The counter man, when he re-filled my cup, commented on the weather. “Sheeting down rain, isn’t it? Never seen so much rain this time of year. Must be those rockets they send up into space. Disturbs the sky, don’t you know?”

I nodded, went back to my table at the window. A man opened his car door, ducked out into the rain, locking his car, coming toward the cafe with his head down only to veer off at the last second. Pigeons huddled on the ledge of the building opposite and a neon sign reflected dully on the wet asphalt.

A blind woman appeared at the right of the window holding on to a brown seeing eye dog. The dog was wet and patient and the woman was wrapped in a plastic raincoat with a hood that came halfway across her face.

At the edge of the window on the stone steps just out of the rain sat a seedy looking man, unshaven, wearing a greasy jacket. He was smoking a cigarette and he watched the blind woman’s dog pass disinterestedly. The dog paid no attention to him.

She could be half a world away, I thought. It was an abstract idea. Distance doesn’t matter when someone is out of sight. I remembered reading someplace that the Navajo had no future tense in their language. Or maybe it was some other people. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t say something like I’ll see you tomorrow or There’s a woman over that hill and if we go over the ridge we will see her. Everything for them was either in the present or the past. Either it was happening at that moment or it had happened. Far-off places were unthinkable. How much easier that would be, I thought.

I realized I had not moved in a long time. It had been a day of long empty pauses. The morning had slipped past me and I could not remember any of it. I sipped my tea. It was lukewarm and bitter.

I remembered climbing the stone steps to a crumbling ruin one summer in Italy. It seemed like it had happened in another life. It had been a hot day and it was cool next to the stone wall. The light off the sea was blinding and Corsica was only a dim blot in the distance. “Corse,” the German boy had called it. There had been a little apartment with cool tiled floors and thick stone walls and shutters that kept out the sun. Light came through the slats, patterning the dark floor and whitewashed walls.

I left the cafe and drove north from Lyme, wandering along the lanes, the way I had done the day I had first come to Sheepheaven Farm. But I found myself drawn toward the farm. I came through the village and there was the beat-up Stryker Land Rover in front of the pub and the little gaggle of wives in front of the post office store. They watched as I drove past, and further down the road I slowed as I came near the entrance to the farm. But the Land Rover wasn’t in the farmyard and I passed the gate, drove on to the Tolpuddle road, went east and circled so that I came at the farm from the lane on the north. I paused at a break in the hedge and looked down toward the farmhouse but it was over the brow of the hill and I could see nothing. I kept on driving, finding myself on a B road toward Devon. I was aimed at the sea and Los Angeles beyond that, but I wanted to turn back and see Maggie again.

The road topped out along the ridge and the hedges were low so that I could see the outline of Eggerton across the valley. It looked like the prow of a huge ship, the earthworks thrust forward, deep ridges where the trenches had been cut and I pulled off onto the verge and got out. Clouds ran along the ridge toward the sea like torn bits of oily mechanics’ rags. To the west it was black and the road in the vale below me was black, reflecting occasional headlights. Another storm was coming and fine rain began to slant in toward me. There was the faint white noise of water running, tiny streams that ran in every crack of the hillside. Eggerton was a low outline, dimly seen, shaped like a woman lying face down and I thought again of Maggie. There was nothing beyond, no lights, only the black thickness of the approaching storm.

I thought of hiking out onto Eggerton, and took the next road that dived off the ridge into the vale, but when I got down at the bottom the roads began to fork and I couldn’t figure out how to get back up toward Eggerton. It was above me now and had lost its shape and I wandered for a half hour in growing rain before I gave up. A signpost read
LYME REGIS
12
MILES
and I followed it, coming into Lyme from the other end, and I drove to the same B&B and when Mrs. Salt answered the door I asked if I could stay another night.

She raised her eyebrows and said, of course, why hadn’t I asked her that morning, and I said that the rain had changed my plans. She, too, said that she had never seen so much rain. “They say the Stour is up to the car park at the bottom of town in Blandford and the shopkeepers are moving things out.”

I had the same tiny room, a bed, a small table and a single chair. Mrs. Salt brought a cup of tea up to the room. “Warm you up, love,” she said. I got out the laptop and plugged in my little transformer. I scrolled down the screen until I came to the Sheepheaven script and I wrote out the cafe scene, and then wrote another scene in which I imagined Maggie standing in that red sweater and yellow trousers in the bedroom at Sheepheaven Farm.

INT. BEDROOM AT THE FARM – LATE AFTERNOON

JACK’S POV: MAGGIE STANDS, her hair framing her face, erect nipples punctuating the red sweater, her slim body beckoning to Jack in the dim room. The curtains are drawn and she stands watching him, the soft swell of her breasts underneath the fabric so erotic he thinks he will cry. He feels himself growing hard and he remembers her words, “but you can’t touch me.”

JACK THINKS, “I will have to cut off my hands.”

And I knew that I would have to re-write the scene, back up and give Maggie her voice to tell him that he must not touch her, and Jack would need an interior voiceover to show that he is thinking he cannot control himself, and I realized that I had, once again, slipped into a parallel world where I watched Jack as if he were some other person. I worked for a while longer, but I found I could not sustain the scene, kept cutting away to Maggie as she got into the Land Rover, and finally I gave up, put on a sweater and a coat and went downstairs. I brought Mrs. Salt the empty teacup and saucer and she said, “You’re not going out into this, are you love?”