Consequences (36 page)

He said, “There’s the path down. Mind how you go—it’s sometimes slippery.”

She forgot what she had been going to say, followed him down. His back, his outline, just ahead, seemed infinitely familiar: that green shirt, his gray-flecked hair, the slightly awkward action, as though he found his legs too long. How can a person you’ve not known for twenty-four hours become familiar?

They walked on the shingle. He pointed out the seams of alabaster in the cliff, gray and rose-colored. “Apparently the time to find good bits is after the winter, when there have been cliff falls.” They picked up a couple of small chunks. As must Matt have done, thought Ruth. Brian found another, and another, pressing them into her hands. “What do I do with all this?” she protested, laughing. Her cotton sun hat was full of opaque, veined rocks.

“Goodness knows. Doorstops? Paperweights?
Objets d’art?
”

They sat on a slab of rock. A gull watched children fishing in a pool. Further off, a boy reeled out another kite. Thin cries all around—other children, a calling parent, other gulls.

“The tide seems to be…”

“When are you…”

Both speaking at once. Both now embarrassed.

“I was going to say,” she said, “that the tide is coming in. Waves a bit nearer.”

“Right. Time and tide, and all that. Wonderfully concentrates the mind. I am fifty-four.”

“I am forty-four.”

“I know. I mean, I didn’t know—what nonsense. What I meant was…I’m getting to the point when there’s a certain tendency to seize the day.”

“This one,” said Ruth, staring ahead, “is a particularly seizable one.”

“What
I
had been about to say was—when are you likely to be this way again?”

He turned. She turned. And now they are looking at one another. In silence. She does not, for a moment—for moments—answer. She looks at him, and in his gaze she sees a possibility of something she has not yet known. It glimmers. In what she feels, in what she sees. A future floats in her head. I know, she thinks, and he knows, and we each know that the other knows. There is no need to say anything. Yet.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m not sure. But I shall be. Definitely. Sooner or later.”

“Sooner,” he said, getting up. “Shall we meet the tide?”

They walked down to the waves. Ruth waded in a little way. The water coming in warm over the mud, your feet sinking in. They returned to the car, talking about anything, about nothing in particular, about everything—this sub-text hanging in there now, unspoken, understood. They stopped at a pub, ate sandwiches, wondered at the array of real ales, laughed over the pretensions of the menu. Brian sighed: “Gone are the days of scotch eggs and a ploughman’s.”

Back at the cottage, there was a van parked outside. “He’s beaten us to it,” said Brian.

Ruth’s car had a new windscreen. The mechanic was sitting on the doorstep, making out an invoice. Brian went inside while Ruth wrote a check.

“Nice spot,” said the man. “Been here long, have you?”

“Oh—I’m just a visitor. I’m leaving now.”

“Have a good journey, then.”

She went inside. Brian was sitting at the kitchen table, with the blocks and the alabaster figure in front of him. She said, “I’ll just go up and get my things together.”

Upstairs, she put her case on the bed, gathered up her brush and comb, toilet bag, nightdress, her other pair of shoes. She packed, then sat on the bed, looking around her, to check for anything forgotten. She was aware of the dancing figures; she was aware, too, of sounds beyond the window—those enraptured birds, the far-off train. It seemed as though she had been here, in this place, for a very long time, as though the last twenty-four hours had strung out like elastic, unrelated to an ordinary day. Someone else, not her, some other Ruth, had left home yesterday; today, she was this new person, who was staring at a possibility, at a probability, at—perhaps—a certainty.

She went down.

He said, “I’m going to come clean. The windscreen chap. I fixed for him to come in the afternoon. So there could be more time. He would have come at ten. Entirely underhand, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, entirely.” She was smiling.

He got up. “I suppose you’re going to go now.”

“Yes.”

He picked up her bag. She took the blocks, and the figure. They went outside. The bags, the block, and the figure were put into the car.

“When?” he said.

“Soon.”

“It had better be.”

They stood there, face-to-face. He reached out, put his hands on either side of her shoulders, held her thus for a moment. Then he stepped aside.

Ruth got into the car. He watched her put the keys in the ignition, start up.

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“Probably not,” she said. “It won’t matter.”

She drove out of the gate. When she glanced in the mirror she saw him standing there, one hand raised. Then she turned into the lane—that would take her away, that would bring her back.