The Story of My Face (18 page)

While he pulls out the bed, she tugs the curtains closed, puts the latch on the door, then steps out of her dress and hangs it on the hook fixed by the door. Half-clothed, they lie next to each other on top of the covers and stroke and kiss the uncovered parts of each other's bodies.

‘I love you, John,' she tells him. She bites, as he likes her to, softly into the muscle between his shoulders and neck. They kiss mouth to mouth and she pushes her lips almost painfully onto his and her tongue deep inside; she presses the whole of her body against his. But when he is naked and makes to take off her brassiére and pants, she shakes her head, separates herself abruptly from him, and lies a foot or so away, looking at him as if she was seeing him for the first or the last time. It is very quiet inside the caravan now, just the sound of breathing, and impossible for him not to see that something is different.

‘What is it?' he asks. She watches him watch her slowly shrink, feels her own damp skin grow cool.

How absurd
, she thinks – so much thinking, where before there had been none, just the forbidden action, performed in a space of its own, completely separate from the rest of life –
How absurd to feel like this, now, after all this time.

Before she spoke it, the secret lay almost peacefully inside her. It was there for her to visit, with due precaution, when she chose. Now it is opposing her; it is trying to tell her what to do. It is making clear that from now on, there will be a price for disobedience.
What do I want most?
she is thinking.
What
will happen – suppose I –

‘John,' she says, softly.

‘Yes?' His eyes shine out of the shadows. She reaches for his hand. There is a kind of peace in the tiny room; she doesn't want to spoil it.

The sun sets behind the hills in a lengthy and spectacular display. We carry rugs and cushions and go to the field by the stream again. I help to serve the food and to clear up. A petition about the passports comes around on a clipboard, with its own pen attached. Barbara watches John test the pen on a corner of the page, sign, then carefully print his name, occupation and address. She writes her own name quickly in rushing rounded script, beneath his small but perfect italics.

‘Five pages already!' she says cheerfully as she hands the clipboard on to Pete Anderton to keep for his mother Elsbeth, who has a mouthful of apple and both hands full of stacked cups. ‘There must be over a hundred there.'

The boy, his twin brother standing behind him like a shadow, catches my eye, and winks. Then he asks, solemn-faced, in a parody of eager curiosity:

‘What do you think the government will decide, Mr and Mrs Hern? Upset us – or break with the UN?'

Mark looks up, momentarily, from his book. The point, John insists angrily to the twins' backs, is not what they do, but what we do –

‘Surely you see that? I'm talking to you –' he calls out after the twins as they vanish into the dusk. Already the congregation is falling quiet in anticipation of the music.

My head hurts, I tell Barbara. She kisses me on the cheek, squeezes me close, sends me to bed.

The shapes of the land and the branches of trees are black against a violet sky. I wander back through the site, examining the variously shaped Vanguards and Princesses and Imps and Minxes, the newer Cortinas and Wolseleys which gleam darkly beside their paler-coloured caravans and tents, some lit from within, others blank. In our corner by the hedge, I clean my teeth using Barbara's brush, spit the water out onto black-seeming grass.

Inside, the caravan is ready for sleeping. I take off my blouse and pull on the too-big borrowed pyjama top, then turn the radio on and sit, half-listening, on Mark's bed. At last, I climb up. My bed, halfway between bunk and hammock, shifts as I get in, bangs softly against the rear wall of the caravan. I lie on my back with my eyes wide open in the dark and wonder whether you have to be sorry to the person you hurt, or just to God? Suppose it was yes, and suppose you were sorry, but couldn't find or tell them – would that matter or is wanting to good enough? Does the person you hurt forgive you, as well as God? Is it their sin if they don't? But then, how would you ever know, if a person
said
they were sorry, that they really meant it? What happens if you hurt someone without meaning to?

I let the questions pass through me, enjoying them without trying to find answers, and then I drift into wanting things. How I want, when we get back, to sleep in the pretty pink and apple-green bedroom, the one with the plants, at the back of the Herns' house, and to come down in the morning for breakfast around the table in the kitchen, to sit next to Barbara, taking up that fourth chair. I want Mark to smile at me. I want Sandra, somehow, as in a dream, to be passing, see us, knock and ask if she could please come in? ‘Yes, Mum,' I want to say, ‘please do – sit here, next to me.'

I want to always have my hair tidy. I want a cupboard, and in it a tin full of almond biscuits, another of cake. I want to be loved so much that I can be forgiven for anything I might ever do, to anyone, ever, however bad it is. I want to have a wedding. I want new plimsolls, a white cardigan; I want to see the men walk on the moon.

19

At the top of the valley, about a mile across country from the site, is a stone house belonging to a couple called Edward and Angela Baines. He is eighty-six, she seventy-nine and all but blind. They're in their dressing-gowns, his worn plaid, hers pink candlewick, quite new; they hold a small tumbler of whisky apiece and sit in winged, pond-coloured armchairs as old as the marriage itself. A television set (Baird, 1968, bought from savings earlier in the year, its screen fully twelve inches across) casts thin greenish light around the small, dusty living-room. The light reflects from Edward's spectacles, loses itself in Angela's cataract-clouded eyes. A brass carriage clock ticks respectfully on the mantelpiece; there's also an alarm clock, wound and set just in case, on the table at Angie's side. A framed photograph on the wall, taken on their week's honeymoon, shows them as they were, on a windy day sixty years ago. Angela's once fine blonde hair has for years been leaving itself on chair backs, pillows, cardigans and refusing to grow. Now it's all but gone and her pert face has melted, grown larger and less defined. Edward's cheeks have hollowed out, his forehead is sectioned like rock.

They hold hands often. Soon, one of them will be alone, for a short, probably terrible period of time: they know this, but it is at the same time unimaginable; they save shared moments against it the way they once put small sums of money in the bank; and staying up like this, because Edward wanted to, is one of them. Neither of them expected to live to be this old, let alone to be in a world which sends men to travel beyond the reach of the earth's atmosphere to make footprints on the moon itself.

A man, six inches high on the screen, talks in front of them about something scientific, and they are trying to remember the name of a male friend of their granddaughter's, mentioned in her last letter on thin blue air-mail paper, upstairs, too far to get. The name eludes them both and they sit waiting, following separate thoughts beginning from this same point and bound, eventually, to come again to some other similar point – then Angie hears something outside, sends Edward to look and he brings me in.

I've been watching through the window, I tell them, for the last twenty minutes. ‘You haven't pulled your curtains,' I explain. ‘There isn't any television on the campsite. It's not allowed.' I am very quiet and polite. It's this, perhaps, along with the half-light and generally extraordinary circumstances that makes my appearing unaccompanied like this in the small hours seem less odd to them than it otherwise might.

‘She'll come to no harm here,' Angie says. Ed shows me to a footstool and I say thank you, and sit down on it, in front of them, close to the television. We see the outside of the lunar module, a hole on the underside from which emerges a human being, Armstrong, in a huge top-heavy space suit.

‘Coming out now,' Ed informs his wife, as Armstrong's booted feet descend nine rungs of the ladder, and tread, at last, on the moon.

‘He says it's a small step but a giant leap for mankind,' Ed says.

‘It's like fine, powdered charcoal. I can see my footprints,' Armstrong says.

‘He's on it. It's just grey. He's got a camera. He's digging. It's in his pocket. Now the other one's coming out. . . .' I sit silently, the end of my plait in my mouth. Aldrin comes down next. The pictures are grainy, blurred around the edges, too black sometimes, but still amazing. There are rocks of every kind, they say, dust. There is a low kind of hill in the distance. The astronauts practise their loping walk, try to run. They kick the moon dust and watch it rise and settle in soft, neat unison around their feet. They plant the American flag, begin their experiments, talk to their president on the telephone. They stand still for minute after inexplicable minute, inspecting the outside of their craft.

Angela is asleep, her breath rattling steadily in her throat.

‘When you are our age,' Ed says suddenly, ‘people will be living up there. There'll be factories and stations for the space ships to go further out. Exploration of the universe. What d'you think?' I just look back at him but say nothing. ‘You wait and see!' Ed puts his glass down, then forgets I'm there and joins Angela in sleep. I keep on watching until the astronauts climb back into the lunar module, leaving their overshoes behind them in case of germs.

It's light outside now. I go into their kitchen and examine the tins and jars on their shelves, wondering whether there is anything I can eat. I decide against it, just inhale the smell of lemons, tea and uncleaned oven, then push quietly out through the unlocked back door.

Everything is different in the dawn light. It's hard to decide which of the fields ahead of me I cut across just hours ago when it was dark. I guess and set off around the edge of the one I've chosen at a fast walk. I think about the moon, and hope there won't be factories or stations up there, making it just like everywhere else. And I hope the Americans don't go there again, or the Russians either, or anyone else. Even if I could go there myself, I wouldn't, not now. The first time is always the best. And I saw it, that's the thing.

I climb over a stile into another field. It's far later than I expected. I pull the sweater off, tie it round my waist, break into a run. I still believe that I'll just about make it back before anyone wakes up and notices me gone, that I'll be able to slip back into bed and lie there remembering what I have seen. But at 3 a.m., sunk in a shocking, wonderful dream, a fabulous beast that escaped him even as he tried to grasp its tail, Mark heard his mother calling his name, as from a great distance. She was standing over him, wearing wellington boots, an anorak over her night-dress. ‘Mark – get up and put some things on. Natalie's gone!' she said. ‘You've got to help.' Cool night air flooded in through the open door, lapping at his skin. The caravan rocked with the movements and sounds his father made finding clothes, struggling into his shoes in the half-light of the kerosene lamp.

Mark raised his hand and pushed at the underside of the canvas bunk above him; it was indeed empty.

‘I've looked in the toilets and the barn. She's taken your father's jumper –' Barbara held up pyjamas, a cast-off skin, threw them back on the bunk. ‘It's after three. I've been up half an hour. We've got to find her, so hurry, Mark, will you now.' Her voice was too big for the thinly-walled room. ‘I'll wake the Andertons. The boys are old enough to come too. Write her a note, in case –' Noticing a half-dry stickiness on his stomach and groin, Mark eased out of his bunk, his limbs fuddled, weak.

Equipped with a torch, he joined the search party in the second, higher field, to the left of Harris's farmhouse.

‘Now, where shall we begin?' one of the Anderton twins, probably Peter, asked his twin in a falsely bright voice. In the dark, a brief, mocking smile echoed between them. They stood so close together that they appeared to be actually joined. Their shoulders sloped unathletically, their hands were sunk into their pockets, their faces, with eyebrows like a child's drawing of flying birds, were only just visible beneath the rabbit-fur trim of their parka hoods. They smelled of something Mark didn't recognise, and when he acknowledged them with a nod, their eyes passed, unseeing, over him.

‘We must think carefully where she might have gone,' their father said.

‘She was with us most of the day,' Barbara explained, ‘with me. . . . There
was
a problem with Christina, but I really don't think –'

‘Do you know anything, Mark?' Anderton asked, gravely.

‘He's not speaking,' Barbara reminded everyone.

‘Has anyone else disappeared?' Anderton asked, maddeningly, pointlessly, for surely he can see it is something they can't know without waking the whole site to check. Generally, Mark thought, people just speak too much, without thinking. A waste of time. But his own lips were sealed, like the neck of a jar, with cork and wax.