The Colonel's Daughter (23 page)

Further along the river, she could hear the mallard quacking. Some evenings at sunset, she had walked through the reeds to find them (two pairs, one pair with young) and throw in scraps for them. Standing alone, the willows in front of her in perfect silhouette, she envied the ducks their sociability. No one comes near them, she thought, only me standing still. Yet they have everything – everyone – they need.

‘I love it here.'

She had wanted to sit down opposite Marcus with her glass of wine, but he had taken the only chair. She squatted, lifting her face to the sun. She knew he was watching her.

‘Do you want me to go away?'

She felt the intermittent river breeze on her face, heard the pages of her novel flap under the stone. She examined his question, knew that it confused her, and set it aside.

‘The novel's going to be about Charlie.'

‘Charlie?'

‘My brother Charles. Who died at school. I'm imagining that he lived on, but not as him, as a girl.'

‘Why as a girl?'

‘I thought I would understand him better as a girl.'

‘Will it work?'

‘The novel?'

‘Giving Charlie tits.'

‘Yes, I think so. It also means she doesn't have to play cricket and risk being killed.'

‘I'd forgotten Charlie.'

‘You never knew him.'

‘I knew him as a boy – through your memories. He of Hodgson's ginger beer larder!'

‘Pantry.'

She's got stronger, Marcus decided. She's gone grey and it suits her. And she's still wearing her bright colours. Probably makes not just her own clothes now, but ponchos and smocks and bits of batik to sell in her shops. And of course her son's friends fall in love with her. She's perfect for a boy: bony, maternal and sexy. Probably her son's in love with her too.

‘Can I stay for dinner?'

Anna put her glass to her lips and drained it. He always, she thought, made requests sound like offers.

*

Anna scrutinised the contents of the small fridge: milk, butter, a bunch of weary radishes, eggs. Alone, she would have made do with the radishes and an omelette, but Marcus had a lion's appetite. His most potent memory of a poetry-reading fortnight in America was ordering steak for breakfast. He had returned looking ruddy, like the meat.

Anna sighed. The novel had been going well that morning. Charlie, renamed Charlotte, was perched high now above her cloistered schooldays on the windswept catwalk of a new university. Little gusts of middle-class guilt had begun to pick at her well-made clothes and at her heart. She was ready for change.

‘Charlotte can wait,' Marcus told Anna, after her one feeble attempt to send him away. ‘She'll be there tomorrow and I'll be gone. And anyway, we owe it to each other – one dinner.'

I owe nothing, Anna thought. No one (especially not pretty Susan with her tumbling fair hair and her flirtatious eyes) could have given herself – her time, her energy, her love – more completely to one man than she to Marcus. For ten years he had been the landscape that held her whole existence – one scarlet poppy on the hills and crags of him, sharing his sky.

‘One dinner!'

*

She took the car into Wroxham, bought good dark fillet, two bottles of Beaujolais, new potatoes, a salad and cheese.

While she was gone, he sat at the table in the sunshine, getting accustomed to the gently scented taste of her home-made wine and, despite a promise not to, reading her novel. Her writing bored him after a very few pages; he needed her presence, not her thoughts.

I've cried for you, he wanted to tell her. There have been times when – yes, several of them – times when I haven't felt comfortable with the finality of our separation, times when I've thought, there's more yet, I need more. And why couldn't you be part of my life again, on its edge? I would honestly feel troubled less – by Susan's chartered surveyor, by the coming of my forty-ninth birthday – yes, much less, if you were there in your hessian or whatever it is you wear and I could touch you. Because ten years is, after all, a large chunk of our lives, and though I never admit it, I now believe that my best poems were written during those ten and what followed has been mainly repetition. And I wanted to ask you, where are those rugs you made while I worked? Did you chuck them out? Why was the silent making of your rugs so intimately connected to my perfect arrangement of words?

*

‘So here we are . . .'

The evening promised to be so warm that Anna had put a cloth on the table outside and laid it for supper. Marcus had helped her prepare the food and now they sat facing the sunset, watching the colour go first from the river, then from the willows and poplars behind it.

‘Remember Yugoslavia?'

‘Yes, Marcus.'

‘Montenegro.'

‘Yes.'

‘Those blue thistles.'

‘Umm.'

‘Our picnic suppers!'

‘Stale bread.'

‘What?'

‘The bread in Yugoslavia always tasted stale.'

‘We used to make love in a sleeping bag.'

‘Yes.'

Anna thought, it will soon be so dark, I won't be able to see him clearly, just as, in my mind, I have only the most indistinct perception of how he
is
in that hard skin, if I ever knew. For a moment she considered going indoors to get a candle, but decided it would be a waste of time; the breeze would blow it out. And the darkness suits us, suits this odd meeting, she thought. In it, we're insubstantial; we're each imagining the other one, that's all.

‘I read the novel, as far as you've gone.'

‘Yes. I thought you probably would.'

‘I never pictured you writing.'

‘No. Well, I never pictured you arriving here. Margaret told me you said you “needed” me. What on earth did you mean?'

‘I think about you – often.'

‘Since Susan found her surveyor?'

‘That's not fair.'

‘Yes, it's fair. You could have come to see me – and the children – any time you wanted.'

‘I wanted . . .'

‘What?'

‘Not the children. You.'

For a moment, Anna allowed herself to remember: ‘You, in the valley of my arms,/ my quaint companion on the mountain./ How wisely did I gather you,/ my crimson bride . . .' Then she took a sip of beaujolais and began:

‘I've tried.'

‘What?'

‘To love other people. Other men, I mean.'

‘And?'

‘The feelings don't seem to last. Or perhaps I've just been unlucky.'

‘Yes. You deserve someone.'

‘I don't want anyone, Marcus. This is what I've at last understood. I have the children and the craft shops and one or two men friends to go out with, and now I have the novel . . .'

‘I miss you, Anna.'

She rested her chin on folded hands and looked at him. Mighty is a perfect word, she thought. To me, he has always seemed mighty. And when he left me, every room, every place I went to was full of empty space. Only recently had I got used to it, decided finally to stop trying to fill it up. And now there he is again, his enormous shadow, darker, nearer than the darkness.

‘You see, I'm not a poet any more.'

‘Yes, you are, Marcus. I read your new volume . . .'

‘No I'm not. I won't write anything more of value.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I'm floundering, Anna. I don't know what I expect of myself any more, as a poet or as a man. Susan's destroying me.'

‘Oh rot! Susan was exactly the woman you dreamed of.'

‘And now I have dreams of you.'

Anna sighed and let Marcus hear the sigh. She got up and walked the few yards to the river and watched it shine at her feet. For the first time that day, the breeze made her shiver.

*

Light came early. Anna woke astonished and afraid. Marcus lay on his stomach, head turned away from her, his right arm resting down the length of her body.

A noise had woken her, she knew, yet there was nothing: only the sleeper's breath next to her and the birds tuning up, like a tiny hidden orchestra, for their full-throated day. Then she heard them: two shots, then a third and a fourth. Marcus turned over, opened his eyes and looked at her. She was sitting up and staring blankly at the open window. The thin curtains moved on a sunless morning.

‘Anna . . .'

The strong hand on her arm wanted to tug her gently down, but she resisted its pressure, stayed still, chin against her knees.

‘Someone's shooting.'

‘Come back to sleep.'

‘No, I can't. Why would someone be shooting?'

‘The whole world's shooting!'

‘I must go and see.'

Marcus lay still and watched Anna get up. As she pulled on a faded, familiar gown, both had the same thought: it was always like this, Anna getting up first, Marcus in bed half asleep, yet often watching Anna.

‘What are you going to do?'

‘I don't know. But I have to see.'

The morning air was chilly. It was sunless, Anna realised, only because the sun had not yet risen. A mist squatted above the river; the landscape was flattened and obscured in dull white. Anna stared. The dawn has extraordinary purpose, she thought, everything contained, everything shrouded by the light but emerging minute by minute into brightness and shape, so that while I stand still it all changes. She began to walk along the river. The ground under her sandals was damp and the leather soon became slippery. Nothing moved. The familiar breeze had almost died in the darkness, the willow leaves hung limp and wet. Anna stopped, rubbed her eyes.

‘Where are you?'

She waited, peering into the mist. The mist was yellowing, sunlight slowly climbing. A dog barked, far off.

‘Where are you?'

Senseless question. Where are you? Where are you? Anna walked on. The surface of the water, so near her slippery feet, was absolutely smooth. The sun was climbing fast now and the mist was tumbling, separating, making way for colour and contour. Where
are
you! The three words came echoing down the years. Anna closed her eyes. They came and shot the ducks, she told herself calmly. That's all. Men came with guns and had a duck shoot and the mallard are gone. When I come down here with my scraps, I won't find them. But that's all. The river flows on. Everything else is just as it was yesterday and the day before and the day before that. I am still Anna. Birds don't matter. I have a book to write. And the sun's coming up . . .

She was weeping. Clutching her arms inside the sleeves of the faded gown, she walks from room to room in the empty flat. Where are you! London dawn at the grimed net curtains . . . fruit still in the bowl from which, as he finally went, he stole an orange . . . nothing changes and yet everything . . . his smell still on her body . . . And where am I? Snivelling round the debris of you in all the familiar rooms, touching surfaces you touched, taking an orange from the bowl . . . Where am I? Weeping. The ducks don't matter. Do they? Keeping hold on what is, on what exists
after
the shot has echoed and gone, this is all that's important, yes, keeping hold on what I have forced myself to become, with all the sanding and polishing of my heart's hardness, keeping hold of my life alone that nothing – surely not the wounds of one night's loving? – can destroy. So just let me wipe my face on the same washed-out corner of a sleeve. And forget. A stranger carries the dead mallard home, dead smeared heads, bound together with twine. But the sun comes up on the same stretch of river where, only yesterday, they had life . . .

*

Marcus held Anna. They stood by his car. It was still morning, yet they sensed the tiredness in each other, as if neither had slept at all.

‘I'll be going then, old thing. Sorry I was such a miserable bugger. Selfish of me to disturb you with my little problems.'

‘Oh, you weren't disturbing me.'

‘Yes, I was. Typical of me: Marcus Ridley's Lament for Things as They Are.'

‘I don't mind. And last night –'

‘Lovely, Anna. Perhaps I'll stop dreaming about you now.'

‘Yes.'

He kissed her cheek and got quickly into the car.

‘Good luck with the novel.'

‘Oh yes. Thank you, Marcus.'

‘I'll picture you working by your river.'

‘Come and see the children, Marcus. Please come and see the children.'

‘Yes. Alright. No promises. Are you going to work on the book today?'

‘No, I don't think I can. Not today.'

‘Poor Anna. I've tired you. Never mind. There's always tomorrow.'

‘Yes, Marcus,' and very gently she reached out and touched his face, ‘there's always tomorrow.'

My Love Affair With James I

William Nichols – or ‘Will', as I think of him – is an actor I'd never actually met. It's odd I'd never met him because a) he's filthily famous and b) his pic is on the same page as mine in
Spotlight
. Actually, my pic is above his as I'm fractionally superior to him alphabetwise, but our page goes: Stephen Nias (me), William Nichols (Will), Bob Nickolls (spelt with a k and two l's and pullulating with his resemblance to Alain Delon), and Ken Nightingale (the less said the better; cast as the eternal traffic warden; should never have had his pic in ‘Leading').