Double Vision (8 page)

He drank it sitting by the window, the hot fluid delineating his oesophagus, another part of his living body reclaimed from the dark. He watched the stars turn pale, saw the empty road curving towards the sleeping farmhouse, and the frost-bound fields, the fires waking in the white grass as the light strengthened. All the time he was debriefing himself, sorting out the dream. He knew if he didn’t take time to do this, it could stain and corrupt the whole day.

Before starting work, he jogged to the top of the hill. Not a breath of air, not a blade of grass or a twig stirred. On the crest he leant against a tree, watching darkness drain down the slopes of the hills as if somebody at the bottom of the valley had pulled the plug on night. Details emerged as the light grew: knobbly black buds of ash, brittle brown oak leaves still clinging to the tree, the veins on the backs of his hands. And then the sun erupted, shredding clouds, pouring streams of light down the valley, turning the moon, that lingered in blue translucent space, into a crazed eggshell.

All around him were the baby fists of new ferns, though there was a rawness in the air that threatened more snow. He began searching for the owl’s nest. It had been hooting again last night, on and on with hardly a pause, as if it thought it was a nightingale. One tree half covered in ivy looked more promising than the rest. He scuffled through the mulch of dead leaves until he found what he was looking for, picked up three or four fibrous brown pellets and put them in his pocket.

Back in the cottage, he took them out and rolled them between thumb and forefinger. He’d picked them up automatically, as he would have done as a boy, but now he thought that Adam might like them. He’d take them up this afternoon, as soon as he saw Justine’s car parked outside the house.

Relations between the farmhouse and the cottage had quickly settled into a routine. Stephen hardly saw Robert and Beth except at weekends, but observed their comings and goings almost as if they were strangers.

Both were busy, and Beth added to the strains of a full-time job by doing a lot of community work. She was a regular churchgoer. That rather surprised Stephen, because Robert was a militant atheist: ‘There is no God, and Sharkey is his prophet’ – that was Robert’s creed. So unless Beth’s brand of Christianity was remarkably accommodating, they must find plenty to disagree about.

Robert worked incredibly long hours. Sometimes, in particularly bad weather, he stayed overnight in the city rather than risk snow drifts blocking the moor road.

Or so Beth said, expressionlessly, her eyes dead.

‘Where does he stay?’ Stephen asked.

‘Oh, There’s always somebody who’ll give him a bed.’

Initially, He’d been afraid Adam would ignore the unspoken rule of no weekday contact and take it into his head to visit his uncle in the cottage. He was such a still, strange, isolated little boy. In Robert’s place he might not have thought it wise to bury Adam in the depths of the country, miles away from other children
of his own age. Out of school he seemed to see nobody except his parents and Justine, whose little red Metro spluttered up the lane every day at four o’ clock, bringing him home from school. Stephen wanted to say to Robert, ‘But our childhood wasn’t like this.’ They’d run wild, at least until the first shades of the exam prison house started to close in. Contrasted with their childhood, Adam’s seemed both overprivileged and depleted. Stephen would encounter him sometimes, trotting along, searching for roadkill or following tracks in the snow, but always, except for Justine, alone.

When Stephen spoke to him, Adam would duck his head, avoid eye contact, mumble something and then, as soon as possible, drift away.

His evident disinclination to have anything to do with his uncle made Stephen perversely more interested in him. So that afternoon, shortly after Justine’s car with Adam in the back had coughed and wheezed its way up the hill, he took the owl pellets round to the house, and spread them out on a sheet of kitchen paper on the table.

‘What do you think they are?’

Adam wrinkled his nose. ‘Poo?’

No kid who regularly brought home roadkill had any right to be fastidious. ‘Wrong end. They come out of the beak.’

‘Owl pellets?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Cool.’

‘Have you got any tweezers?’ Stephen asked Justine,
who was standing by the cooker, frying sausages for Adam’s tea. She didn’t look as if she had. Like everything else about her, her eyebrows were flourishing and entirely natural.

‘Got a meat skewer.’

She rattled about in the cutlery drawer and produced one.

‘That’ll do.’

He showed Adam how to tease out the small bones, skulls, feathers, fur and other indigestible parts of the owl’s nightly diet. Adam was totally absorbed. Stephen met Justine’s eye over the sleek, bowed head. She smiled and said, ‘You can come again. This is the quietest he’s been for weeks.’

Before long a neat row of skulls was lined up on the table.

‘Now you can wash them,’ Stephen said, starting to clear away the debris.

Adam ran off to the downstairs bathroom with his treasures in his cupped hands.

Stephen dusted off his hands and was about to go – he hadn’t intended to do more than deliver the pellets and retreat to the cottage – when Justine said, ‘Do you fancy a cup of tea?’

He fancied something a bit stronger than tea, but he could scarcely ask Beth’s au pair to raid the drinks cupboard. ‘Yeah, good idea.’ He was tired, he realized, sitting back in the chair, and He’d hardly spoken to anybody all week. ‘You nearly finished for the day?’ he asked, as she filled the kettle at the sink.

‘Just about.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘Beth’s always late back on Thursdays. There’s some sort of meeting after work, and it just seems to run on.’

How on earth had this bright girl ended up doing this? Over tea – Adam busy with his skulls at the other end of the table, snuffling through his mouth as kids do when they’re interested – she talked about her life, the job, how it was this or being a barmaid and Dad had thought this would be easier. There was no mention of her mother.

‘What does your mother think?’

‘God knows. Buggered off years ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’

A shrug. ‘No need, it was a long time ago. It was a great scandal at the time, you know? Vicar’s wife runs off. Not supposed to happen.’ She smiled. ‘You didn’t know I was a vicar’s daughter, did you?’

‘No.’ He wondered if she was a virgin. ‘Do you have to do anything?’

‘Do anything?’ She was amused. ‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Good works.’

‘No. Well, I don’t, anyway. No, I just keep lots of spiteful old cows supplied with gossip.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘I inherited that role from my mother.’

‘You could go off somewhere.’

Her face darkened. ‘It’s difficult.’

Deserted, possessive dad? ‘You’re going to stay here all year?’

‘No, well, don’t tell Beth, will you, because it’ll freak her out, but I think I might talk Dad into letting me go
on one of those crash secretarial courses. And then I could get a proper job. You can’t get a job with just A-levels. Nobody wants to know.’

‘Sounds like a good idea. Where would you do it?’

‘London.’

‘Ah.’

He thought of Justine and her milkmaid cheeks in some office in Kensington tapping away on a keyboard thinking real life had started at last. Though he was the wrong one to criticize anybody for thinking real life was somewhere else – He’d devoted his whole working life to that particular delusion.

‘What’s this?’ Adam asked, holding up a skull with two long, orange-coloured teeth in the front.

‘A mouse,’ Stephen said.

‘How do you know it isn’t a shrew?’

He didn’t, of course.

‘You’ve got plenty of books,’ Justine said. ‘Why don’t you look it up?’

Stephen stood up to go. She came to the door with him, looking, he thought, prettier than she had the other night. He did find her attractive, though by now he was so frustrated he would have found almost
any
young woman attractive – and his definition of ‘young’ was becoming more generous by the day. But this one was too young, and much too close to home. If things went wrong – and how with a twenty-year difference in age could they not go wrong? – it could become very messy. And they wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing each other.

Thinking like this implied he stood a chance, whereas in fact she probably thought of him as even more decrepit than her father. At best as a nice, kind, avuncular figure helping to amuse Adam.

Not a pleasant thought.

He set off down the frosty path, raising his hand to wave to her as he reached the gate, feeling the withdrawal of warmth and light as a minor but real abandonment.

Eight

The phone was ringing as he opened the front door of the cottage, and he ran into the living room to pick it up. As soon as he heard Nerys’s voice, he caught the brown fug of his breath rising from a suddenly bilious stomach. Nerys sounded controlled and strident, spoiling for a row. She’d had an offer for the house, she said, and she thought they ought to accept it. The papers were full of a slowing down in the housing market, well, they’d been talking about that off and on for months, hadn’t they, but this time people did seem to think it was actually going to happen, so –

By ‘people’ he suspected she meant Roger. Roger-the-lodger, the sod. ‘How much?’

‘One and a half million. The estate agent says they’ve got the money. What do you think?’

‘Grab it.’

‘That’s what I thought. Well,’ she said breathlessly, ‘I’ll go ahead, then, shall I?’

‘Yes. And thanks, Nerys. I know you’ve had all the work.’

‘That’s all right.’ She managed to sound gracious and aggrieved at the same time. ‘Are you well?’

‘Yes, fine. And you?’

‘Fine.’

Somehow in a plethora of ‘fines’ they managed to get off the phone. It must be over, he thought, replacing the receiver, if they’d reverted to being polite.

He’d hardly put the receiver down, when the phone rang again. He jumped to answer it, superstitiously afraid it might be Nerys ringing to say the sale had fallen through, though if so it must’ve been the shortest negotiation in history – but it was Beth, sounding resentful, as she always did when asking a favour. She gave generously – she was always dashing about doing some good work or other, letting this, that or the other cause eat into her scanty free time – but she’d never learnt to ask or receive gracefully, so it was a slightly petulant-sounding Beth who explained that Justine’s car wouldn’t start, and she couldn’t stay over because it was her father’s birthday, and they were going out for supper, so could he possibly run her home? Beth would have done it herself, of course, but Adam was in the bath and couldn’t be left. Stephen cut her short, saying it was no bother at all and He’d be up to the house in a couple of minutes.

Fortunately, he hadn’t started drinking. One of his health ploys was to put it off till later and later in the evening.

Justine was waiting at the gate, Beth just visible at the crack in the front door. ‘Goodnight,’ they called to each other. ‘Have a nice evening,’ Beth added.

Stephen waved, but didn’t get out of the car.

As Justine settled into the passenger seat and pulled the seat belt across, he said, ‘I don’t know where you live.’

‘Hetton-on-the-Moor.’

‘No wiser.’

‘It’s the other side of the forest. Don’t worry, I’ll direct you.’

‘Is it far?’ He was wondering about the petrol.

‘Six miles.’

Not far, then, though distances were deceptive here. The country lanes wound round so much that estimated travelling times were apt to be too optimistic. And then there was the forest, with its single road, its mile after mile of impenetrable trees.

‘Is it anywhere near Woodland House?’

‘Kate Frobisher’s place? Yes, she lives a couple of miles outside the village.’

‘One of your father’s parishioners.’

‘Yeah, but not the God-bothering kind.’

A short pause, as the car bumped off the grass verge, its headlights illuminating hedgerows laced with frost.

‘Why, do you know her?’

‘I’ve met her once or twice. I knew Ben well. I did quite a few assignments with him.’

‘Bosnia.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ He was surprised she knew. It must be history to her.

‘I read the book. Left here.’

He took the corner, his headlights revealing the dark mass of the forest straight ahead. ‘That was the last book we did together.’

She mumbled something about it being very tragic. He agreed that it was. After that they drove for a while
in silence, and the soft sound of the tyres over slushy snow seemed to seal him off from normal life. There hadn’t been time for the news about the house to sink in, but he was beginning to realize he was free. Single. He didn’t know whether he felt elated or frightened, but elation was closer. He felt he was setting off for a day out, instead of just driving Beth’s au pair home.

‘You scored a real bull’s eye with those owl pellets.’

‘Yes, he liked them, didn’t he? And you don’t have to boil them to get the skulls.’

‘That’s right.’ She laughed. ‘We’re going to label them tomorrow so that’ll keep him busy. And then we’re going to do a proper survey: how many mice? How many shrews? What’s the percentage of each animal in the owl’s diet…? I don’t suppose you could show me the tree, could you? Because we’re going to need a lot more pellets.’

‘Of course, come over any time. It sounds like an awful lot of work.’

‘I don’t mind. I’ll miss him, if I do go on this course.’

‘I wouldn’t’ve thought he was all that easy to take care of. He’s –’ He pulled himself up, sharply.

‘Weird. Yes, I know, but I don’t think There’s all that much wrong with him. Beth was frantic when they diagnosed Asperger’s.’

He mustn’t let her see that he hadn’t known. ‘I’ve never really understood what that is.’

‘It’s basically a sort of difficulty in seeing other people as people. Like if you were looking at this’ – she pointed to the trees his headlights were revealing – ‘there
wouldn’t be any essential difference between me and the trees. So you can’t change your perspective and see the situation from another person’s point of view, because you can’t grasp the fact that they have their own internal life, and they might be thinking something different from you.’