Robbie's Wife (16 page)

“Do you feel badly now?”

“No.” She touched my face. “You’re a sweet gentle man, Jack Stone. You touch something deep inside me. I have no idea what it is. But I want things to be like they were, with the other Jack lagging around my legs and Terry and Robbie at the table and I want to take down the bed-and-breakfast sign and turn the clock back. I need to go, Jack Stone.”

She rose from the bed, bent over and picked up the old blue sweater. I reached out, took her hand and pulled her back toward me.

“What if there were no Robbie?”

“That’s a stupid question, Jack Stone.”

“Yes,” I said, “but what if there were no Robbie? What if he didn’t exist? Would you stay with me?”

“I said it once. The question is stupid. There is a Robbie and a Terry and there always will be. I love you and I love Robbie and I love Terry and I even love old Jack the dog, and it’s all different and I can’t explain it.” She stopped, her hands pressed to the sides of her head, as if she were holding her head together and then she said, “No, it’s not like I love you and I love him as well. Don’t ask me again Jack Stone, please. There’s no magic wand here. Robbie won’t disappear in a cloud of fairy dust.”

“If I stay here, will you come to me again?”

“No. No matter how often you call, I won’t come again. Please go home to America. Put an ocean between us. I think of Robbie right now, shearing sheep in that shed, desperate, and he’s in a black mood all the time and he needs me, all of me, not part of me. He’s waiting for the army to come, they’ll come, no doubt of that. Part of me is here with you. I love you, Jack Stone, but I can’t see you. I have a living, breathing husband. I’ve made that bed myself. That’s where I’ll sleep tonight.”

I could see Robbie in the dark shed with the sheep and I wanted him to disappear. I felt the way I had felt in the pub, desperate for Robbie to fall into a well, be crushed by Will Stryker’s tractor, be transported to Australia where he would be lost in an opal mine. Perhaps, I thought, in his black mood he will kill himself, but I knew that Maggie was right. He wouldn’t disappear. He was there, now, shearing the sheep, and Maggie was dressing to go to him.

Maggie pulled the blue sweater over her head, reached up and pulled her hair out of the neck, shook her head so that her hair flew loosely about her face.

“What did you see in me, Maggie?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why me? Of all the men you’ve met, why did you end up here with me? I’ve nothing to offer you.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Jack Stone.”

“But why me? Sixty years old, worn out, and look at you. You could have anyone.”

“Do you want a list? Is that what you want? You want me to take out my grocery pad and write down all the reasons?”

“Tell me one.”

“You’re a handsome man, Jack Stone. And you’re smart and kind and most of all you love me. I think you’d do anything for me. If I asked you to swim the river for me tonight, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

I thought of the turgid brown water pulsing under the bridge and I nodded.

“I know you would, and that’s a bit frightening. And if I say to you, go away because I cannot live with you and Robbie at the same time, I know you love me enough to do just that.”

She had stepped into her skirt and she stood there, running her hands through the tangle of her hair.

“If there were no Robbie, if something terrible happened to him tomorrow, yes, I would stay with you, Jack Stone. But things don’t just happen by themselves. We make them happen. And I cannot make Robbie go away.”

She reached out to where I lay on the bed and touched my face. “Will you get dressed and come out to see me off?”

I dressed while she waited at the door and we went out to the Land Rover. It was black and the noise of the river was continuous, a sliding rush that filled the air. I could imagine Robbie trying to swim the river, caught in the current, his head bobbing under, disappearing in the darkness, swept away.

“I told Robbie I was going shopping at Tesco in Bland-ford.” Maggie pointed to some grocery bags in the front seat. “I shopped before I came here.”

I put my arms around her, pulled her close.

“Goodbye, Jack Stone.”

We kissed and she got into the car and I told her to take care of herself, that I would write to her, and she said, yes, tell me when you become rich and famous, and she started the Land Rover and went over the bridge and up the track, the headlights illuminating the row of trees and then Maggie was gone.

The cottage was no longer warm and inviting. It was empty and I felt drained. I packed my things into my duffel bag and drove across the bridge in the darkness, headed for London. I would wait a week, come back to Dorset, somehow see Maggie again. The M3 was filled with traffic, despite the late hour, headlights coming at me from the wrong side, and I felt disoriented and angry. I blamed myself for asking the question about Robbie, as if that were what had caused Maggie to pull away from me.

It was midnight when I got to London, and I wandered around, lost among one-way streets, finally finding Russell Square, parking on a street not far from my little hotel. The same desk clerk was on duty, and I could smell whisky. Yes, he said, it was a bit late, and yes, he could find me a room and would I be wanting a help up with the bag, sir?

I tipped him, took my bag and the key and found the room on the top floor, a climb of four flights of stairs since the elevator wasn’t working. It felt like the first night I had come to the hotel from the plane and I slept until nearly ten o’clock the next morning.

I took the car back to the rental agency, explained the cracked window as vandalism and filled out a form, listing the Glastonbury police as the source for a report. I came back in on the Northern Line. A smiling young woman was at the front desk and I asked her if there were a weekly rate for my room. Two hundred and eighty pounds, she said. I did the mental arithmetic and realized that I would be paying nearly sixty dollars a night. It was cheap by London standards and I paid it but I knew that if I kept spending at this rate I’d be out of money within a month.

I spent the next few days alternating between working on the screenplay and walking the streets of London. Somehow, what had happened at Sheepheaven Farm seemed like some other world, a parallel universe where characters made love and walked in the countryside and dogs scrambled over the backs of sheep while I watched from my safe vantage point in London, unconnected to those events.

Always, though, I imagined Maggie, rising from the tub, lowering herself on top of me, I remembered kissing her nipples, her passion infusing me as I walked in Hyde Park, seeing couples walking hand in hand and imagining Maggie there with me, swinging her hand in mine.

Several times I found myself in a phone box wanting to call Maggie but I didn’t, I went back to the room, wrote out descriptions of her, began to write alternate scenes in my screenplay in which Maggie and Jack were in that little flat on the edge of the Mediterranean where I remembered the sea, or Maggie and Jack met again in the stone cottage in Dorset, or Maggie suddenly knocking on the door of my hotel room and Jack opening the door and there she was in her old blue jumper, smiling at him.

I went once to see Nigel, told him I was working on a screenplay and he seemed interested in the premise.

“You ought to send a treatment to Richard in L.A.,” he said. He asked how the coast-watcher story was coming and I said it was on hold but I had this marvelous character, a woman who was a Dorset housewife, the one in the new screenplay, and I would let him see some parts of it.

“I have no idea where this story is going,” I said. “But she’s the most compelling character I’ve ever written.”

Nigel said the next time he talked with Richard he’d tell him I was on to something. I don’t know why I went to see Nigel. He was someone to talk to, someone I knew, however casually, and I wanted to tell him about Maggie and me, that it wasn’t fiction at all, that there was this woman in a country farmhouse who was in love with me and I was in love with her only we were separated by something neither of us understood.

I went back to my hotel and I buried myself in my writing, imagining Jack and Maggie together, writing furiously, the words tumbling out.

Always, though, I returned to the scene where Maggie drove off and the phrase ‘What if there were no Robbie?’ echoed. I imagined Robbie coming out of the pub, half-drunk, climbing into his Land Rover and driving down the road and then, when he came to the roundabout, he didn’t look to the right, just as I hadn’t looked that first morning I had rented a car and had nearly been broad-sided by a lorry, but there was no roundabout between the pub and Sheepheaven Farm and Robbie wasn’t smashed by a lorry.

And I imagined Maggie showing up at my room, escaping once again from Dorset; this time she hadn’t gone to the ballet, she had come to me, but the hallway was empty and I walked once again on Upper Woburn Place, down Euston Road to Regent’s Park, making a giant circle that would end in my room and the laptop and Maggie.

I was passing St. Pancras church when I saw the notice “Memorial Service” and heard the faint sounds of an organ. It had begun to rain again and I stepped inside. St. Pancras isn’t one of those restored churches — it’s a bit seedy on the outside, dark inside, well-worn, a church that’s still in constant use and I had wandered in there before. I stood at the back, watching the small knot of people dressed in black, sitting silently along both sides of the nave.

“May I help you, sir?”

The voice came from a young man in a black cassock who had materialized at my elbow.

“I’m afraid I’m intruding,” I said.

“Did you know the young man?”

“Who?”

“The memorial service. The young man it’s for.”

“I’m afraid not. I heard the organ. I came in out of the rain. I should go.”

“It’s quite all right. If you want to stand back here, no one will notice.”

“Who was he?”

“A stonemason. He was doing some work on St. George’s Church, not far from here, and the scaffolding collapsed. Tragic. A young man with a family. Here.” He handed me a sheet of paper. At the top was
St. Pancras
and an elaborate cross and underneath was written:

Kevin Overend

Beloved husband of Brenda Overend,

father of...

and there was the usual list of names, children, father, mother, brothers, sister.

“You might say he died doing the Lord’s work,” I said. “Working on a church.”

“Hardly.” The voice had lost its softness. “He died doing work for a contractor, replacing stones in a buttress.”

I didn’t look at him. I knew what was going through his mind. Was I an idle tourist, or was I one of those creeps who go around attending funerals? Or was I some sort of Jesus freak who might hang about and interrupt the sanctity of his memorial service?

“Thank you,” I said, and I stepped out into the rain. The street was filled with traffic, black taxis and red buses and the wet noise of tires and all I could think of was the fact that Kevin Overend had been alive last week while I was at Sheepheaven Farm and now he was dead. One minute he was hoisting a stone into place and the next minute Kevin Overend was going end over end toward the pavement. You’re here and then you aren’t. Simple as that. Fall off a scaffolding, Robbie. Would Brenda be off dancing in the pub next week? Out with her girlfriends while her mother watched the children. “Be good for you dear to get out,” mum would say. And what was Brenda thinking there in the nave in her black dress? Good riddance? Sorry you’re gone, Kevin, but I owe a pint to the chap who forgot to tighten those bolts on the scaffolding?

But Robbie didn’t climb on scaffolds with heavy stones and there was no chance he would suddenly disappear. A woman came toward me, and she looked, for a moment, like Maggie, and I started toward her, called out, but she continued walking and I realized it wasn’t Maggie. She walked with a clumsy gait. I turned away and imagined Robbie across the street, hailing me, waving his hand, and darting out into the street and a bus crushing him, thumping over his body while the street came to a standstill, pedestrians froze, cars stopped, a freeze-frame in a script I was writing in my head, and I turned down Euston Road, searching for a pub where I could have a drink.

Coming back from the pub I suddenly began to speak out loud, head down in the rain, a movie pitch, something I had done dozens of times, two hundred words, tell the important part of the story, capture their imaginations. I could picture those familiar Hollywood faces around the table and I leaned forward, intent, stopping at a bus shelter, sitting next to a man, telling him how Robbie might disappear. And then I rose and went back to my room and took off my wet clothes and sat naked at the laptop, wrapped in a blanket while I wrote repeated pieces of the pitch, and I thought of myself in third person, wondering what Jack would do and how Jack could make Robbie disappear. At first I thought in terms of Robbie getting sick or having an accident. But Jack couldn’t count on Robbie getting sick or having a road accident. Somehow there had to be something that could happen to Robbie on the farm that would be fatal. Like Kevin Overend’s fall. Something that would be a natural act on the farm. There would, of course, be a police inspector in this script, and I thought of who would play the part, perhaps Alan Bates and then I thought, no, Clive Owen, he plays that smart detective who always gets his man only this time Jack would foil Clive Owen, plan this thing so perfectly that Owen would come to the farm and get out of his black police car and he would tell Maggie, who was waiting for him in the kitchen, that he had examined every aspect and he was sorry, but it was an unavoidable accident, just one of those freak things, I know that doesn’t make it any better, Mrs. Barlow, but there’s nothing more I can say.

Now the trick was to plot this thing so carefully that it would become just that.

INT. FARM SHED, DUSK