He Wants (13 page)

17

He wants to always be here

L
EWIS IS SLOWER
than Sydney to get dressed again, slower to get himself up off the floor and leave the bedroom. By the time he gets down to the living room, Sydney is standing smoking his electronic cigarette, scowling at it. Lewis moves towards the sofa, not quite sure what to say.

‘Don't forget your book,' says Sydney.

Lewis, who has reached the coffee table, comes to a stop and picks up his book. He looks at the cover, as a browser in a bookshop might, although it is all just a blur. He looks as if he is about to say something, perhaps about the book, or about the last time he was here.

‘Come on, then,' says Sydney. ‘I'll drive you home.'

They go into the kitchen where Sydney puts on his coat and shoes and picks up his rucksack. Lewis wishes he had his winter coat with him, or his favourite jumper, something more substantial to go outside in. He does not even have his gloves. He tightens the belt of his dressing gown.

Someone, thinks Lewis, is going to come into this house and pull out all the units, tear up the tiles, strip the crazy wallpaper. They will put this old kitchen into a rusting yellow skip. They will want everything new. They will have to have the electrics done, he thinks.

Sydney opens the door, letting the dog out first.

Lewis, the last down the path, looks for broken windows or a bottle smashed on the ground, but there is nothing to see. He looks for a ticket on the windscreen of the car, a clamp on the wheel, but there is nothing there, nothing to say that they have done anything wrong. There is no warden walking away from the car with the registration number in a notebook.

Lewis pauses before getting in. Putting his book down on the roof of the car, he checks his slippers, as if he might have mud on them, or horse shit, evidence that he has been here, closer to the heart of the countryside, closer to nature, than he has been in years. His slippers, though, illuminated beneath a streetlamp, are very clean.

As they set off, Lewis says, ‘Barry knows where I live.'

‘Lock your door,' says Sydney. ‘You'll be fine.'

Lewis imagines Barry sitting on his doorstep, waiting for him to come home, or rattling the front door in the middle of the night, and then the back door, trying the windows. He will have to remember to bolt the back door, to keep his windows locked. He will lie awake, listening.

He would rather not go home, but where else would he go? He cannot stay here – Sydney's house is also known to Barry Bolton, and, besides, it has been sold. At Ruth's house, he would have to sleep a partition wall away from Ruth and John's room. The house on Small Street no longer exists and he cannot sleep at the nursing home.

They drive back up the lane, the ground rough beneath their wheels, their lights shining through the darkness ahead, and Lewis thinks of the cargo ship that could not dock. He wants to always be here, in the yellow car, with Sydney.

‘You're not the one who's got what Barry wants,' says Sydney. ‘And when he comes looking for me, I'll be long gone.'

It is not much use, anyway, locking his doors and windows, when he will see Barry in the nursing home at teatime on Sunday. He pictures a showdown in the lavender-coloured living room, a heated confrontation with dolphin song in the background. Lewis will say that he does not have the car, that Sydney has it. Barry, standing a touch too close, will ask where Sydney is, and Lewis will say, quite honestly, that he does not know.

‘You must have some money, though,' says Lewis. ‘You must have made some money from your books. Why can't you just give Barry what you owe him?' If I had the money, thinks Lewis, I would buy a new suit and two shirts and a new coat, a new hat, new gloves, the lot.

‘The money I've got,' says Sydney, ‘is going to take me far away from here.'

Lewis is sitting on something hard. Reaching under his bottom, he extracts his spare pair of glasses. They are a bit bent but not broken. He puts them on, twisting round the rearview mirror to look at his face, clean-shaven but no longer smooth-skinned; at his shorn hair, his schoolboy cut, all the colour and thickness gone. He looks nothing like a schoolboy; he looks like the old man he is.

Even though he cannot see the back of his neck, the site of the mole's removal, he is aware of the growth having gone, and of feeling strangely bare. It feels sore. He thinks about Sydney's hand being there, about his dirty fingers, his being a bit rough. He feels as if the stitches – the stitch – might have been pulled through the edge of the wound, opening it up again. He imagines a small hole in his body, his insides showing. He will have to walk back to the surgery and it will make his knee hurt. When he gets home, he will go to the bathroom and inspect the wound using Edie's hand mirror. Perhaps he will find that the wound is fine and looks just as it did before.

He does not, he suddenly realises, have his book. He feels like Mr Benn going home without a souvenir in his pocket. He has no sea shell, no wooden spoon.

‘What will you do with the dog,' asks Lewis, ‘while you're away?' He twists around to look at the elderly golden retriever smiling on the back seat of the car. ‘I could have her,' he says. ‘I could look after her.'

They speed down the long, dark country lane with their headlights on full beam and it makes Lewis think of flying, of what flying might be like, and of how you would be fine, you would be safe, up there in the air.

Acknowledgements

T
HANKS AS EVER
to my first readers and trusted advisers: my supportive and eagle-eyed husband Dan and my furiously hardworking agent and editor Nick Royle. Thanks also to Arthur for being on my team. (The children in this story are fictional; Arthur is the best climber and explorer I know.) Thanks to John Oakey for another beautiful cover, and to Jen and Chris at Salt for their enthusiasm.
Thanks to my late father for responding to my enquiries about Billy Graham's visit to Manchester in 1961, to Annette for memories of seeing Billy Graham in London in the 1950s, and to Penny for proposing going to see Billy Graham in a tent in Loughborough in 1989. Thanks to the café at Manor Farm in East Leake – where a good deal of this novel was written while my son was at pre-school – for the coffee and a seat by the radiator in the New Year and the cold spring of 2013, and thanks to The Windmill in Wymeswold for having such a fine collection of curious old books.

Th
e book about the physics of the future that Sydney mentions is
Physics of the Future: The Inventions That Will Transform Our Lives
by Michio Kaku, and the scientist ‘talking about rubber bands' is Richard Feynman. ‘We that are alive, that are left, shall . . . be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever' is from the New Testament (I. Thessalonians). ‘The sky-lark and thrush, / The birds of the bush' is from ‘The Ecchoing Green' by William Blake, and ‘breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home' is from ‘The Soldier' by Rupert Brooke. ‘Pack up the stars, dismantle the sun' is a misquotation of WH Auden's ‘Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun'. ‘Have you ever tried jiu-­jitsu?. . . I'll show you what I can, if you like' is from DH Lawrence's
Women in Love
, and ‘great tufts of primroses under the hazels', ‘dandelions making suns, the first daisies' and ‘columbines and campions, and new-mown hay, and oak-tufts and honeysuckle' are from
Lady Chatterley's Lover
. ‘Tonight is mine' is from Bram Stoker's
Dracula
.