Sea Change (20 page)

He does a strange thing then. He picks up Phil’s artificial leg, and walks with it like it’s a baguette he’s just bought at the bakery, feeling the rigid plastic weight and shine in his grip, into the other room.

‘Here,’ he says to Phil, holding the leg out.

Judy is curled into the other corner of the sofa, nursing her own drink. Her red scarf is on the floor. Innocence discarded.

‘Let’s go to bed, Judy,’ he says. ‘It’s late. We’ve got a long drive tomorrow and you must be exhausted.’ It’s like a line from a film.

‘I’m a bit beyond tiredness,’ she says, conceding, but not quite looking him in the eye. And then she does, uncompromisingly, a level look of her calm green-brown eyes. ‘You’re right,’ she says, ‘I think it’s time we all went to bed.’

Phil holds out his arm and for a second this confuses Guy. Does the man want to shake his hand for some reason? And then he realizes: Phil wants his leg.

‘Oh. Yeah,’ Guy says, handing the leg over. An interesting transaction, that, to give a man his leg back. Phil doesn’t strap it on. Instead he rises unsteadily on his other leg, and Judy and Guy help him from either side, Guy thinking how ludicrous all this actually is, to be helping the man.

It’s not a long way to Phil’s bed, and Guy’s thankful for that. At the doorway Judy peels off to go to the bathroom. Phil reaches for a crutch in his room and starts to move about in there, putting some sidelights on, and Guy is left awkward and large in the doorway.

Guy goes to his room and sits on the end of the bed, the spot for thoughts his whole life long. That’s where he sits when he and Judy have any kind of discussion, and in this way he feels he’s preparing for it, right now, however late it might be.

But by the time Judy is out of the bathroom, Guy has gone back to the lounge. It’s quiet and very empty. He looks at the red sofa as if it’s a guilty thing. An object tinged with shame, part of the betrayal it encouraged, how dare it sit there in the corner as if nothing ever happened.

Phil’s door is closed. It would be easy to go to bed now, Guy thinks, but he knows just as well what would happen - he’d just lie in turmoil, until the morning, while Judy no doubt slept. Instinctively - and getting a perverse pleasure from it - he gives Phil’s door a quiet knock. Too late now, Guy thinks, wondering whether Phil might, in fact, think this knock is coming from Judy. He hears the rubbered foot of the metal crutch take two steps across the room, then Phil opens the door.

Before the door is even fully widened, Guy has thrown his punch, putting every ounce of his weight behind it, straight into the side of Phil’s face, where he sees a fantastic moment of sheer alarm registering the split second before his fist strikes, followed by the enormous wide-eyed shock of Phil’s expression as he falls to the floor.

Phil stays on the floor, crumpled like a heap of clothes to be washed, fully accepting it. Guy says nothing, and doesn’t bother to close the door as he walks back to his room.

Position: Anchorage in Deben estuary. 11pm

Guy stands at the wheel and starts the
Flood
. Immediately the engine growls heavily beneath him, vibrating the floor and rattling the windows in the frames. He steps out on deck, preparing to cast off from the mooring buoy, and feels the whole boat is shivering with expectant life, with possibility and direction.

But it’s getting on for midnight. Where, realistically, can he go? The estuary is two directions of the blank nothingness this side of England is famous for: go upriver, and you end at a collapsing notch of thick mud where the
Flood
would be grounded; or go the other way, to the open sea, with its sandbanks and endless water, its gathering storms and lethal swells, a wilderness out there waiting for him. In this darkness it would be ludicrous, even if he knew the river.

Writing tonight’s entry in the diary has shocked him. He knows now why he’s been dreading the trip to Nashville so much. An affair, after all this time. He should have listened to Freya - she has instinct in bucketfuls. And he wonders, really, why he’s doing all this to himself. You make it as real as you can, that’s what he told Marta. You give the diary every chance to surprise you, and as a result, you have to take what comes.

But Judy choosing Phil? It doesn’t make sense. After all these years of his support and love. This is how he’s to be repayed?

He cuts the engine, defeated. To calm himself he tries to remember Judy as she was. His Judy, not the one she has become, full of secrets and unpredictability, but the one he remembers. And the image he has of her is beautiful. She’s surrounded by a soft blue light. But this time she’s not on stage. They’re in a bluebell wood. It’s early spring, and they’re entering the hazel copse - a gentle place full of birdsong and a smell of earth and dust but in this moment, transformed, as it was every year, by the flowers. Together, they walk in the shadows under the slender trees, spellbound by the emerging haze of eerie deep blue that surrounds them, under their feet, rising like a tide.

They stand, in awe.

‘We mustn’t tread on them,’ Judy whispers, her voice already affected by this special place.

‘There are more than last year, I think,’ he replies, and he squats on his haunches, to maximize the sight of pure blue above the stems of the flowers. ‘Wow,’ he says, simply, then prefers not to say anything more.

‘Guy,’ she whispers, ‘I’m going to write you a song about this place, so we can remember coming here.’ She wanders off, into the maze of flowers, and he sees their colour saturating the air around her. He sees her as a soft object herself, in a suede jacket, with high boots made out of some synthetic fur, a small brown shape moving among the blue. She appears as if she’s weightless, in a dry watery glow that seems to lift her.

‘How can this come out of the soil?’ she asks, inspired and amazed. And he remembers it now - the song she wrote:

I’ll remember you in a soft blue light
Each year,
A softened air, arriving
Never fear
Blue-bell

I’ll hold you in a soft blue light
A petal’s clasp,
With the birdsong, rising
Heartbeats last.
Blue-bell

That’s his image of her. His perfect image. His life had been without anchor really, till he’d met Judy. Judy who’d stood outside that cabin in Norway letting the drips from the icicles splash on her face, who’d put her whole head into that ridiculous fountain at the Rushcutter’s after their first gig. ‘Promise me we’ll go, Guy,’ she’d said. Across America. ‘OK, I promise,’ he’d replied, and he’d kept that promise to her, in the diary. But now she’s looked back at him in the stolen reflection of a brass coal scuttle, and she’s broken all her promises to him in return.

There’d be nothing in the bluebell wood now, no sign of the flowers or the plants, the coppice would have an extra absence to it, like looking at a meadow after the fairground has packed up and left. You’d think all that blue would stain the ground, but it never does. Vivid colours never last.

It’s after midnight when Marta returns, tying her boat to the side, climbing quietly on deck and letting herself into the wheelhouse. Guy’s in his bunk, just about to turn in, when he sees her shadow, long and undecided, being cast across his cabin floor.

For a moment, Marta stays like that, her shadow coming into his cabin, but not herself. Then she gives a polite knock to the side of the hatch frame and begins to climb down the ladder, afraid to look him in the eye, but unafraid to be entering his room, which seems suddenly very small for them both. She’s holding her plimsolls in one hand, by their laces. Her feet look cold and muddy and have red marks where the shoes have rubbed.

‘I’ve come back.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He looks calmly at her, trying to gauge the situation. ‘Where did you go?’

‘Just rowed.’ She smiles, embarrassed. ‘Sorry for being upset before.’

‘You don’t need to be.’

‘I feel I need to explain. Rhona thinks these migraines, they might be the same thing, that her father had.’

Marta sits down at the foot of his bunk, suddenly full of purpose. She puts her shoes on the floor and rests her hands on her lap. ‘And I’ve been thinking about what you told me. I think you should probably stop writing that diary. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but this fiction of yours, because that’s all it really is, it sounds like it’s more important than the rest of your life, and probably will be until you move on from it.’ She pauses. ‘Am I speaking out of turn?’

‘No.’

‘The first few days after Howard died I felt like that. I felt like I’d died too, but somehow they’d forgotten to bury me - like in that film with David Niven when he’s an airman. I just couldn’t contemplate carrying on. I really expected to fall asleep one night and not wake up the next morning. Well, I felt like that, but it never happened. I think I’m too healthy, really. And then I began to wonder whether it was Rhona who was keeping me going. Having a daughter meant I couldn’t give up. But you know what - I was wrong - it was me who wanted to keep on going.’

Guy listens to her - the effort of saying all this is taking its toll - and he thinks about Freya, her small limp body as he ran with her from the field, even the stallion knowing that something unnatural had occurred - it had walked away, defeated; he thinks about this Howard man, in a hospital bed, covered in wires and tubes and hooked up to colourful monitors. The dead seem to be with them, always. And if it’s not the dead themselves, it’s the closeness to death that’s with them, too. His swim into a North Sea wilderness, Marta’s quiet wondering whether her heart will give up, even Rhona, afraid of a darkness within her, afraid there might be a path between regular migraines and the stealthy wound which grew and grew in her father’s brain until it killed him.

He looks at Marta’s subdued profile, and realizes she is now nearer to him on the bed. The intimacy of the moment has brought them closer, quietly, they’ve been working together, taking the obstructions away in a calm order, so that Marta leans towards him, softly, and kisses his neck. A warmth from her touch spreads through him, he smells the scent of her hair, and feels her lips kissing his cheek, her hand holding his shoulder, and then she guides him towards her and kisses him again, more fully. He feels his glasses being nudged aside by her cheek. He kisses her, like that, for a few seconds it seems, before he pulls away, and looks at her, so close, so changed with the arrival of what they have just done. Her expression looks dreamy, a little drugged even, with the slackness of her mouth, still opened, still shadowed within. A tiny glimpse of that quirky tooth, between her lips. And when her eyes open he sees them change shape a little as she focuses. A moment later, and a small frown appears between her eyebrows, the hint of fear and embarrassment he knows might come if he doesn’t kiss her again.

For some reason he is paralysed, by indecision, or by a fear of consequences. He doesn’t know. But he doesn’t move, and gradually he sees Marta drifting back a little. She looks down, away from him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, quietly. ‘That was a mistake.’

He feels terrible then. Terrible to have seemed to have rejected her. Maybe he had, he’s not quite sure.

‘Don’t,’ he says, then doesn’t know what else to say.

She looks up at him, braver now. ‘I shouldn’t have come back,’ she says, ‘it was bound to have ended like this, and now I feel stupid.’

‘You’re not. I’m the stupid one.’

‘You don’t have to make me feel better.’

‘I know.’

‘So don’t.’

‘I’m, confused I suppose.’ He anticipates the conversation tripping down familiar alleyways of explanation and excuse, all of them inadequate and all of them utterly predictable. He doesn’t want to spoil things like this, not with her.

‘I’ll leave now,’ she says, firmly.

‘You don’t have to,’ he says, unsure what he might be promising. She’s no fool, she’s not going to make herself vulnerable again.

She stands and pulls her skirt straight - curious how our clothes take it upon themselves to go ahead of the situation. That skirt, it’s trying to be taken off already. He smiles.

A hardness seems to come over her expression. ‘Is it Rhona?’ she asks. ‘It’s Rhona you want isn’t it? I’ve seen you look at her. Oh Christ, what a mess I’ve made of this.’

‘No,’ he says, confused, ‘that’s not it.’

‘You’re what, thirty-seven, thirty-eight? I’m ten years older than you, and Rhona’s fifteen years younger than you. I mean, I’m too old and she’s too young - is that it?’

‘Marta - you’re getting hysterical. It’s nothing like that.’

‘But I can see it’s quite a dilemma for you.’

He realizes, quite suddenly, that he’s been a fool. All he has is nothing compared to the love of someone else. Company. Friendship. All the world can offer a man in the prime of his life - it means nothing if there is no one to share it with. Otherwise, his days are like an endless collection of events and experiences, to be housed in cabinets that are never opened, display cases that have no visitors. This might just be a moment that could change his life. Marta is a wonderful warm-hearted woman and he’s made her feel hurt and rejected and he had no intention of that at all. Not at all. He stands, always so big under the cabin’s low wooden ceiling, and he moves towards her, wanting to wrap her in his arms and hold her, all night, regardless of what it may or may not lead to, he’ll take whatever comes. All he knows is that he wants to share with this woman, at this moment he wants to share everything with her. He’s been such a fool. But as he approaches her she is retreating, steadily, misreading him as a man who’s trying to let her down gently, not wanting to put herself on the line again.

He stops, clumsily, midway between her and his bed. All he needs to do is go to her, hold her, but he can’t. He just can’t move.

She looks at him from the hatchway ladder. ‘You know, she says, ‘I meant everything I said to you.’ She smiles at him, and climbs out of his sight.

Guy looks at his abysmally empty cabin, which still has the gentle fragrance of the woman who has just left. His space, again, but he’s not enough to fill it. He should go after her.
Go after her
. But he doesn’t, he stays in his cabin, feeling wretched, yes, that’s it, wretched, no other word for it.