From a Distance (30 page)

Felicity’s eyes widened, and he saw tears rushing into them, but she nodded and stood up. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

Michael had booked a ticket on the sleeper from Penzance that night. Earlier, he bathed Kit in the china washstand in the bedroom. His hand cradled the baby’s head and he leaned close, storing memories of his son, whispering lines of his favourite poems in a mad belief that Kit might one day remember them. Michael studied Kit’s eyelashes as they swept his cheeks, the dimples banded across his tiny hands, his inverted baby version of knuckles. Kit’s tiny grasp, surprisingly firm, wrapped the full might of his baby strength around Michael’s forefinger. His skin was soft, slippery in the water, smooth as marble, flawless. His legs kicking delight, constantly moving, his mouth pursed to blow bubbles of concentration. He was extraordinary, Michael thought. He’d read once about an experiment where an athlete mirrored every movement of a tiny baby over the course of one day. It had floored the athlete. Kit, he thought proudly, would run rings around any of them. Kit crowed with laughter then looked surprised, he had made a new noise, and startled himself. For a moment it seemed he might cry, but he righted himself, and his eyebrows, finely drawn above eyes dark as obsidian, rose to an arch. Michael tickled his tummy and he laughed some more. Kit was exhausted by the time Michael had fed him his bottle and put him, warm, milky and almost asleep, in his cradle. Saying a silent goodbye, Michael breathed in the soft sweet smell of his son and prayed never to forget.

The Indian summer was at its golden height. Michael fastened the strap of the wristwatch Felicity had given him.
‘Time will run back and fetch the age of gold’.
This was his age of gold. He was in it right now, and he could not fool himself that it would come again. He stood on the threshold of the house, Felicity was in her studio. He would go to her in a moment, and then he would leave for the station. He shut his eyes, the better to experience the scents of the evening, the salt on the air, cut with a hint of woodsmoke and the waft of dry grass. He could hear the gulls in the harbour, the clatter of dishes in a house nearby, and the sharp lilt of children playing on the beach below.

Michael found Felicity emptying a rag bag, scraps of fabric tumbled around her on the doorstep where she sat, and she had begun to fold cloth pieces into piles. ‘Order out of chaos,’ she said, her voice sharp, and bright. She was keeping busy. That’s what she’d said she would do when he left. ‘I’ve got all this to untangle,’ she waved at a basket holding a nest of coloured thread. ‘It’ll take me a while.’

Michael sat down next to her on the step, and dropped a kiss on her bare arm. ‘Kit’s asleep,’ he said.

The smell of bacon frying drifted up from the village, and in the shade, the air had the cool edge of autumn.

She nodded. ‘He’s tired after today, all the sea air on our picnic.’ She was calm. Michael was afraid that if she cried, he wouldn’t be able to leave. He pulled her towards him in a tight hug. She yielded against him her cheek on his shoulder. ‘Time for the train, are you sure you want to come to the station?’

She lifted her face and darted her eyes to his, then away, but he caught the sheen of unshed tears. ‘Of course I’m coming. Verity’s come to sit with Kit, she’s in the kitchen. Let’s go.’

As they walked out of the gate Michael turned and looked back. Already it wasn’t his life any more. The open casement, the red checked curtain fabric at the kitchen window, the hydrangea climbing up to the sill of Felicity’s room, all were simply abstract shapes now he was leaving them. He turned to face the road ahead, holding hands with Felicity, and he tried as hard as he could not to cling to her fingers.

Saying goodbye to Felicity was like a nightmare. He was somewhere far away when he kissed her, her face blurred, smeared with tears. She wasn’t crying, he realised, they were his tears. He floated above his own body, through their last farewell, and as if from a great height, he saw himself pull away from her and step up on to the train as the whistle blew. It was a nightmare that could have no end. He leaned out of the window, trying to say something. What on earth was he trying to say? She shook her head, walking down the platform, her eyes locked on to his as the train began to move. He was shouting something, but no sound came out of his mouth and the engine gathered speed. Suddenly there was no gaze between them. Only distance. All he could see was the shape of her, her outline delicate, hard to make out, everything so blurred. Her figure flickered in the gloom of the station. She was waving, blowing him a kiss, she smiled, her handkerchief balled in her hand. His eyes smarted, he dashed a hand across them, and she wasn’t there. Gone. Out of his life with one breath. Darkness fell inside him. A flame had been extinguished. The train curved away, the setting sun reflected off the sea and bouncing through the row of carriage windows. The glass panes, the passengers within, glowed like facets on an amber necklace until the sun slowly slid beneath the horizon.

It was some time before he looked inside the basket Felicity had given him. The train was quiet. Michael shared the carriage with one elderly man who, having glared at him for a bristling couple of seconds, announced pugnaciously that he would get off at Exeter. Then he shook out his newspaper with a crack and held it up in front of his face. The pages fluttered like a trapped moth until Michael stood up and closed the window, but the man didn’t speak again. Michael was left to his thoughts. They were desolate. Opening the basket, he decided, was the last act that connected him to Felicity, and he wanted to savour the moment.

Once his companion had gone, the carriage was his alone, and he was ready for the final act of parting. The train hurtled through St Erth and Liskeard, St Germans and Saltash and out of Cornwall, as Michael spread the picnic on the seat next to him. There was bread and a piece of cheese, apples, a pork pie wrapped in a napkin, and a bottle of beer. He ate slowly, the taste of the bread, the smooth earthy beer they always drank on picnics was evocative of home. Home? No. A place in his past. Felicity and Kit would go on being there. Michael saw black through the window and thought that an abyss lay outside the train carriage as it thundered through the night. He put the picnic tin back in the basket, and noticed that at the bottom was a cushion. Made by Felicity. Every stitch was hers, the green and blue seahorse fabric was the same as the curtains in their bedroom in Mousehole. He pulled it out of the basket, and buried his face in it, it smelled of her. He shut his eyes and breathed as much of her into himself as he could. It would be nice to lie on, and with this thought he turned the cushion over on the seat beside him. The other side was embroidered with an intricate picture of a lighthouse. His lighthouse. Red and white in the landscape he knew so well and which she had never seen except in his painting. Scattered like daisies in the grass at the bottom of the picture, the words,
‘light of my life’
. The carriage had been empty since the elderly man had departed at Exeter. Michael lay down, tucked the cushion under his head, and slept.

Returning home was every bit as difficult as he had imagined. Norfolk had changed as much as he had. The scars of war were raw, and Michael found himself close to tears much of the first days. He didn’t have any part of himself spare with which to miss Felicity as he sat on the bus through the dereliction of Norwich’s bombed streets. Even though clearing up was underway, even though there were busy shops and the glimpse of the market with its striped stalls and colour, Michael was wrenched by what he saw. On the familiar journey towards the coast, he was disturbed by the quantities of debris, sheets of corrugated iron that lay in fields next to rolls of rusting barbed wire. It was worse than Cornwall because in his mind it still looked as it had before the war. He had not anticipated the scars of those five years would still be raw. Buildings sagged, exhausted, surrounded by long grass, the windows like staring eyes, blank and baleful in their neglected state. Others were neat and clean. He noticed a cottage where a woman swept the step, a brown hen pecking contentedly behind her. He saw a spaniel lying flat in the sun on a lawn next to the long shadow of a great cedar tree. He walked the final leg of the journey.

It was a whole day since he’d left Mousehole, and it felt like several lifetimes since he’d last walked in the gate and up the path to his parents’ house. His journey was over. His only certainty, his one conviction, was that he was here to stay. He didn’t know anything else, and he couldn’t bear to think, because every thought turned like a magnet seeking its pole, to Felicity. It was late afternoon when he finally walked into the kitchen at Green Farm House and picked his mother up in his arms. His heart slipped a beat, there was so little of her. She was as light as a shuttlecock, he could have held her up for an age, and he did, spinning round with her in the kitchen, with Badger, the collie dog, barking and the door wide open to the yard. Michael didn’t want to put her down. He didn’t want to see that his mother, like Badger, was stiff now, and his father, whom he could see walking up to the house through the yard, was bent and slow. He didn’t want to stand alone in the kitchen with her and experience for himself Johnnie’s absence.

He pulled a chair back and placed his flushed, teary-eyed mother in it. ‘I’ll find Dad,’ he said and burst out into the fresh air, a fighting strength and purpose in his step as he strode to meet his father. He was a man, not a boy any more. He was strong. He had made himself strong while he was away, and he could work now as hard as Johnnie had ever done. He would have to. He was here to take his place, in the midst of his shattered family, and be big enough to carry Johnnie’s memory as well. He had to do it, and he could. Everything would be well.

‘It’s good to see your face again,’ Michael’s father reached up to put his hand on his son’s shoulder, touching his cheek with the back of the other. Michael’s father’s skin was rough and hard, like rock. The older man’s face had sunk in the years Michael hadn’t seen him. Hardship had knocked hollows under his eyes and graven age in fissures on his face and hands, but his ribcage was as flimsy as a dandelion clock when Michael embraced him, and he wanted to button up his jacket to stop the wind taking his father away in fragments.

He had been back a month before he got in touch with her. Janey was waiting for him at the King’s Head in Blythe. He saw her, a fair head bent over a book at the end of the smoky room, no hat. She looked vulnerable somehow, and he caught his breath. It was as if time had frozen since they last met, and he had stepped sideways to a different universe. Approaching her, he took in the shadow of her hair falling across her cheek as she read, the movement of her wrist as she turned the page, and his throat was dry and tight. She was both familiar and a stranger.

‘Janey.’ His voice came out strained.

‘Oh.’ She jumped up, caught her knuckle on the table edge and dropped the book. They both crouched to pick it up, he saw the glitter of her ring. Michael pressed her fingers as he returned the book, and she smiled her thanks. Her green coat was adorned with a small silver brooch shaped like a horseshoe.

She saw him looking at it. ‘Your mother gave me this, do you remember?’

He nodded, although, in truth, he didn’t know what he remembered and what he imagined any more. Tea arrived, the waitress sniffing as she dumped a heavy tray between then.

‘The sandwiches don’t have crusts,’ she announced without preamble.

Janey giggled. Michael froze, stole a look at her as she moved the cups on the table. She was graceful. Everything about her was light: her colouring, her soft hair like sunlight streaked across sand, her clothing, her movements. She was, he thought, a gentle soul. He’d like to salute that. Come to think of it, that was the answer. He needed a brandy, he looked at his watch. Four o’clock. What the hell. ‘Shall we have a drink instead?’

Janey poured tea. ‘Go ahead,’ she said coolly.

He opened his mouth to pretend that tea was fine, and saw she was trying not to laugh. He shrugged and called the waitress. He had no idea what he was doing, no plans, and no one to turn to. He had come back. His mother had told him Janey would want to see him, and he was here. Janey had kicked a shoe off. She glanced, at him, and perhaps hoping he wouldn’t notice, slid a hand down to scratch her instep.

He grinned at her. ‘Itchy feet?’

Laughter lit up her face. ‘Always. The places I keep meaning to go—’ She flicked a glance at him, friendly, uncomplicated. Her nose had a charming tilt to it, insouciant, happy-go-lucky. He owed her some form of certainty. A flutter of hope moved in his chest. She owed him nothing.

‘You look different,’ she said. By now they had drunk a cup of tea each, and a Horse’s Neck. Janey didn’t believe him when he asked the barman for this phenomenon.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s brandy and ginger ale,’ Michael explained. ‘It’s a failsafe when you’re nervous.’ He hadn’t meant to say that. He didn’t look at her. The glass was placed in front of him, a curve of lemon peel see-sawing on the rim. He flicked it. ‘That’s the horse, you see, leaning in for a tipple.’

Janey’s peal of laughter turned the heads of two men at the bar.

‘I want one,’ she said. ‘It sounds like something from the movies.’

Her tea went cold as she drank it, chattering, animated, rushing out comments on her favourite films, the books she’d read, the stories she’d come across. She was easy company. Michael ordered another round of drinks.