The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (45 page)

She wants to say more. She wants forgiveness. And this too shames her, that he is the one in pain, and she the one who seeks comfort. So she goes.

At the end of the aisle she turns and looking back sees the rector illuminated by the coloured light of Christ in glory. The Christ who had to suffer crucifixion to get the glory. This is the lie, she thinks, the great Christian story, that after the suffering comes the redemption. Maybe for Jesus, but not for most. After the suffering comes a room in a flat in Ealing. All the rest is just a classic bolt-on job.

52

All through the first three lessons of the day Jack finds it hard to concentrate. When break comes Toby will want the news. Daddy says tell Toby what happened and he’ll get it, but he doesn’t know Toby. Toby goes off in ways you can never tell in advance. Maybe he’ll say they have to send another letter asking for much more money now they know the Dogman is afraid. I won’t do that. Toby can send the letter himself.

Then what? Then I have to go around with fat Dan Chamberlain and barmy Will Guest. The three losers. But at least I won’t get sent away to a prison school.

Jack’s night of terror has had this benefit: he now knows there are worse things than losing the favour of Toby Clore.

When the bell rings for morning break Jimmy Hall has a random fit and starts shouting at people for no reason. He makes Peter Mackie look for his blazer even though he’s looked for it a hundred times, and when Peter Mackie just stands there goggling round him like a zombie Jimmy Hall gets so stressy he actually stamps his foot.

‘The rules say you wear your blazer! So you will wear your blazer!’

Then he makes everyone carry chairs to the barn.

‘But sir it’s our break. It’s not fair.’

‘Not fair? Who said it was
fair
? Nothing’s
fair
, Jason. Justice standeth far off and truth is fallen in the street.’

‘Yes sir.’

When at last Jack and Toby and Angus and Richard gather by the tennis courts half the break is gone. Jack bursts straight out with his pre-prepared story.

‘I posted the letter but the Dogman saw me so me and my dad went to talk to him and he asked us not to tell about what he did.’

‘I still don’t know what it is he did,’ says Richard Adderley resentfully.

Toby is watching Jack with his cool unmoving eyes.

‘And?’

And what? Jack has no idea what to add. So he adds the detail that has lodged most vividly in his memory.

‘And he’s got a new baby. All he can think about is this new baby. And he’s got two little girls too. And this new baby.’

‘The Dogman’s got a new baby.’

‘Yes. Really new. Small.’

Toby absorbs this information in silence.

‘Well,’ he says at last, speaking slowly, ‘I think that’s sad. I think babies are sad. What do you think, Angus? Do you like babies?’

‘No,’ says Angus. ‘Who said I did?’

‘You don’t go round destroying when you’ve got a baby.’

In some part of Jack’s mind he grasps that Toby has no use for a domesticated Dogman.

‘He was wearing a woolly jumper,’ he says.

‘A woolly jumper? What sort of woolly jumper?’

‘Striped. In lots of colours.’

Toby Clore shakes his head.

‘No,’ he says. ‘That is so sad it’s almost gay.’

His gaze shifts, to reach across the nets to the main terrace. There stands Jimmy Hall, overseeing the morning break, his hands clasped behind his back, his anger still evident in his abrupt changes of posture.

‘Justice standeth far off,’ says Toby.

‘The Dogman doesn’t make any money out of his farm.’ Jack pursues his advantage. ‘He says everyone hates him.’

Instinct guides him. With each additional item of information the Dogman’s prestige dwindles. Toby Clore has no interest in persecuting a loser. And as it happens he believes he has found a new prophet in an unlikely form. The mismatch between outward appearance and inner rage appeals to his taste for the unpredictable.

‘Behold the true prophet,’ he says.

They follow his gaze but can’t make out what he means.

‘Where, Tobe?’

‘The true prophet lives among us but he’s in disguise. He’s an angel of the Lord. An archangel maybe. What do you think, Jacko?’

Jack is all too willing to play along.

‘Lucifer,’ he says. ‘He was an angel.’

Toby Clore nods his appreciation. He has that look on his face. He’s off on one of his jags.

‘Lucifer,’ says Toby Clore, ‘does not have a baby. Lucifer does not wear a woolly jumper. Lucifer does not whine that everybody hates him.’

He sets off across the cricket pitch for the terrace. The others follow.

‘Lucifer is filled with righteous anger,’ he says as they go. ‘We worship and obey.’

Jack laughs out loud. He has followed Toby’s mental tracks where the others are still floundering. This one’s going to be a cracker.

Toby bounds up onto the terrace.

‘Mr Hall sir,’ he says. ‘Please give us a sign, sir.’

‘I’ll give you a smack round the head, you cheeky little beggar.’

The sun comes out from behind a cloud and suddenly the terrace is ablaze with light. Shadows sweep over the flanks of the Downs. A crowd of Year Threes come tumbling out of the French windows onto the terrace and chase squealing onto the grass. Jack saunters away with his friends. When they are out of sight round the corner they all burst into laughter.

‘We can’t worship poor old Jimmy,’ says Richard Adderley. ‘He’s a total reject.’

‘That’s all you know,’ says Toby Clore. ‘Me and Jacko know different, don’t we, Jacko?’

‘He’s the angel who fell to earth,’ says Jack. ‘He’s the lord of hell.’

‘See, Richard?’ says Toby. ‘You shouldn’t go round assuming you know about people. People aren’t the way they look. Are they, Jacko?’

‘No,’ says Jack. ‘People are random.’

53

He’s sitting on the stone steps of the hotel warming himself in the sudden sunshine like an orphan. Dressed as he was before, smart shoes, light jacket, his grey-gold hair ruffled by the breeze. He tracks the Volvo with his eyes, the corners crinkling, his mouth acknowledging her punctuality with a wry smile. He doesn’t move. As always, everything about Nick Crocker is unemphatic, his attention only granted slowly. But here he is, waiting for her.

‘Nick, we’re going for a walk. Don’t you have any boots?’

‘No,’ he says, getting into the car.

‘You’ll ruin your shoes.’

‘They’ll be okay.’

She swings the car round the gravel sweep and heads back out onto the main road.

‘We’re lucky. We’ve got a fine day.’

He says nothing. Looks out at the scenery.

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Anywhere,’ he says. ‘You decide.’

‘We’ll do the home walk. It starts at one end of the village and goes up to the top, and brings us back down again by the church.’

This is Laura’s compromise with herself. She’s seeing Nick alone, but seeing him on family territory. No hole-and-corner assignation. Not that there’s likely to be anyone else on Edenfield Hill on a Monday afternoon.

She turns off the main road at the roundabout and drives through the village, past the church and the farm and the cricket pitch, to the gates of Edenfield Place.

‘We’ll leave the car at the back of the big house. There’s a path leads up onto the Downs from there.’

When they get out Nick looks at her, studying her in that way he has, taking in her sturdy walking boots and her jeans and her waxed jacket. She tugs a woolly hat out of one jacket pocket and pulls it over her hair.

‘It’ll be blowy on the top.’

No one can say I dressed up for him. Nothing remotely sexy about a waxed jacket and a woolly hat.

He’s holding out an envelope.

‘What’s this?’

‘For you. Put it in a pocket somewhere.’

‘Can’t I open it?’

‘Not yet. I’ll tell you when.’

She puts the plump envelope unopened into the inside breast pocket of her jacket, wondering what it can be. Only after they have set off through the little kissing gate onto the steep path does it occur to her that she should not have accepted it. This is some power game of Nick’s. He should either give her the letter or withhold it. This giving and not giving is a bait, a lure. But to return it now would make too much of it.

They say little while they climb. The path opens out onto a tractor way, but the going is still hard on the lungs and the thighs. The ground is a mix of chalk and flint, made slippery by recent rains, and once or twice Nick loses his footing. But he doesn’t fall.

Laura is setting the pace. Without quite admitting it to herself she wants Nick to have to struggle to keep up, but he’s fitter than she supposed. When she pauses to catch her breath he’s right behind her.

She points to the four ash trees that line the path, she shows him their low sweeping boughs.

‘The children call them the swing trees. They swing on the low boughs.’

Jack and Carrie with her in spirit: her chaperones.

He goes and sits on the sturdiest of the low boughs, his feet touching the ground, and pushes himself gently back and forth.

‘Don’t you swing too?’ he says.

‘I’m too big.’

‘No, you’re not.’

So she sits on the bough next to his and pushes herself back. Lifting her feet, swinging forwards, she feels the sudden swoop of uncontrolled motion, and lets out a little cry. Nick swings too, and as they swing, moving at different speeds, they collide. Her knees bump against his thigh, then they part again.

‘It makes me feel giddy.’

She gets off her bough. He remains seated. He’s smiling at her.

‘What?’ she says.

‘You’re even more beautiful now than you were then.’

‘Oh, please.’

‘You think I don’t mean it?’

For God’s sake I’m blushing like a nineteen-year-old. Like I would have blushed when I was nineteen if he’d talked to me this way, which he didn’t.

‘You’re more beautiful now, and you’re sexier now, and I want you so much it’s killing me.’

Not now, Nick. It’s too late.

‘So you think a little flattery will do the trick, huh?’

She speaks in a light bantering tone, trying to defuse his intensity and control her own response. But of course flattery does the trick. Married women are exiled from the flattery zone, mothers at any rate, not so many men come on to mothers. It’s been a while. Her defences are in a poor state of repair.

‘There’s no trick,’ he says. ‘I promised myself I’d say everything. This is part of everything.’

‘It doesn’t help,’ she says helplessly. ‘It doesn’t go anywhere.’

‘Me saying you’re beautiful?’

‘Yes.’

‘It doesn’t have to go anywhere. It’s here.’

He gives a little lift of his arms that’s the beginning of an invitation. Come to me.

Can it be so easy? Can you take what you want and give no thought to the future?

Take what?

A rush of shame. She turns away so he won’t see the desire that has taken her unawares. She wants Nick to kiss her.

‘We’d better keep going.’

Away from the swing trees, away from Nick, not looking to see if he’s following. On up the last stretch of steep track, until the stubby concrete column of the triangulation point comes into view over the brow ahead.

‘Soon be at the top.’

Then the brisk wind and the great cloud-charging sky and the view south over tumbling green hills to the sea. To the east the masts of the radio station. To the west the valley of the Ouse. To the north the wide weald where the road and the railway run, and the high spur of Caburn, and the great fertile wooded landscape disappearing into the distance.

My home view. Henry’s view.

When they come here with the children he shows them how to find their house, which is hidden by trees. First find the pinched steeple of the church, then imagine you’re sitting on its very top and reach out your left arm. There where your fingers are, see, the red-brown roof, the glimpse of white-framed window? That’s Jack’s bedroom.

Laura stands with Nick Crocker on the South Downs Way, alone in the world.

‘Isn’t it glorious?’ she says.

The wind harries Nick’s hair and tugs at his jacket. He’s as handsome as he ever was, his high cheekbones lit by the spring sunshine. He spreads his arms as if to embrace the fields and the woods and the villages.

‘The English countryside,’ he says. ‘Please take your litter home with you. Leave this facility as you would like to find it.’

Laura laughs but doesn’t understand.

‘It’s not a park, Nick.’