Sea Change (21 page)

And while he’s thinking this way, he imagines he hears a tiny tap on the wheelhouse glass, but he knows it’s not a tap on the glass at all, it’s a vibration coming from the engine, that’s all, a sound coming from the car or the road - Judy hasn’t heard it yet, and Freya might already be asleep in the back of the car, he’s not sure.

He sits down to write, looking ahead of him, at the relentlessly straight American road with its central yellow ribbon in his headlights, as it stretches through the night into Mississippi.

They have driven all day and much of the night, too far and too long. He can feel the ache of the journey throughout his body and he knows that Freya and Judy are feeling it too. It’s been the biggest distance yet, and he’ll probably have to suffer the consequences of that, he thinks. A sense of argument is already there, in the car, without anything having been said. Right now, it’s just a looming worry, shapeless and vague, but it’s there nonetheless.

‘I need to stop soon,’ Judy says, rather suddenly, from the passenger seat. She’s been quiet for some time, and the voicing of her tiredness is a real alarm bell. He knows she’s right. He’s been driving this straight road all day, and now, in the dead of night, it’s still not letting him feel he’s getting closer. At every sign that slides forward out of the dark he expects to see the name of the town he’s aiming for, but it never arrives. Other place names, more lengths of straight road, it has the feeling of a dream he can’t escape from.

Even America seems to have vanished. The hills and rolling countryside of much of their journey has been replaced by a sudden and frightening flatness. Pitch black. Featureless. It’s the Mississippi Delta, and there’s no end to it, there’s nothing he can grasp out there.

‘Where
is
this place?’ Judy says impatiently. He wants to snap at her, tell her to shut up because he’s trying his best, he’s doing the driving, but he’s learned over the years to hold his tongue - she can elevate an argument effortlessly, citing a whole bagful of resentments he never knew she was carrying and, right now, he’s not really in a state to defend himself. Yes, he’s driven them as far away from Nashville as he can today, but why the hell not, given what he left behind?

‘OK, I think this is it . . .’ he says, calmly, offering her some hope and taking a sheer gamble that he’s close now. Sometimes, you just have to stick your neck out. There are some dotted lights out there, in the cotton fields. This must be right. But there again he’s been looking at the same patterns of lights in the fields for about forty minutes now. He’s been driving fast, too, trying to eat up those miles while the others have been unaware.

‘I thought you might be asleep,’ he says, taking a glance at her. The dim light of the dashboard picks out her profile, giving her a mournful, overly absorbed look. He wants to chase up his comment with a question about how she is, how she
really
is, but he knows he has to wait for that. No point breaking down walls when the roof might fall on you.

‘This is like the fens,’ she says. It is, he thinks, it’s as flat and as agricultural. Replace the sugar beet with cotton, that’s all. ‘We’ve come a long way just to be driving through Lincolnshire, ’ she adds. He smiles at that, hopeful that her joke might buy them some time. Then he wonders at her, how she can flip from acerbic comment to gentle humour so easily. She’s a puzzle to him.

Suddenly the sign he’s been looking for flies by like a ghost, dirty and half-forgotten. God, if he’d have missed it! He slows the car and a second sign confirms he wasn’t just seeing things. Not quite the lights he’d been looking at, but another vague collection of lights and windows not far off in the field to the right. He slows more, and turns the car off the road on to a rough farm track, and they bounce their way carefully along that until they reach the buildings.

It’s an old plantation house, with guest rooms out the back, but to Judy and Guy it seems like a film set, with wide wooden verandas wrapping round it, old clapboard facades, and bales of cotton tied up on the back of flat-bed trucks parked in front. They drive round the building, watching it pass like a slowly tracking shot in an old movie, till they find a space that looks fine to leave the car.

When he opens the door he’s struck by how warm the air is. Again, they seem to have driven into a different climate. It’s exciting. Judy is gently waking Freya up, and Guy steps away from the car in order to get a glimpse of how it looks, from the outside, with the thin shine of its courtesy light glowing from inside. He sees Judy, her face shadowed, bending over Freya, adjusting the seatbelt, and Freya waking up disoriented, surfacing from wherever she was.

‘Hi, Dad,’ Freya says, through the glass, and Guy raises his hand back in greeting. This is like when she was young, he thinks, he and Judy driving through the night with Freya bent double in a child seat in the back, her tiny head lolling with the motion of the car, so painful it looked, although no manner of clever cushioning could keep it from doing so. They’d arrive and Freya would gradually come round, bleary and tearful, with hot cheeks and red crease marks from the fabric on her skin. It felt so cruel, always.

The girls close their doors and join him on his side of the car. There’s a soft wide sound of insects, filling the night air - a distant enveloping hum of crickets and cicadas, and every so often a thin reed of that hum slides forward in the air, separating from the background noise and rising in pitch as something indecipherable flies though the air before them.

‘Are we staying here, Dad?’ Freya asks, confused.

‘I hope so,’ he replies, noticing how undecided Judy looks. She’s not going to back him up until she sees what kind of place it is.

The main building is long and grey and unlit, with no clear entrance and no apparent sign of life. But then he sees it, a glimmer round the windows at the far end of the building - there must be heavy curtains hanging inside.

‘This way,’ he says, hopefully.

He opens a screen and knocks on the door, then opens that too.

Inside he’s amazed to see a warm golden-lit room, full of books and shelves and several chairs and tables. Oddly, there’s the sound of a blues guitar playing, though he can’t see anyone, and as he leads his family in he realizes there are three men seated at the far end of the room. One of them says hi, then continues to watch the guitar being played.

Guy and the others walk right up to them while the song plays out. The guitarist is fairly old, black, in denim dungarees, and he’s bent right over the fret board. He has long dry fingers, curling round the chords like crab claws, but when he stops his hand hangs down, his fingers relaxed and loose.

‘Sweet tune, P,’ one of the men says. He’s a greying man with a wide waxed moustache and a pleasant smile. ‘I real lyak that,’ he adds, drawing his words out in a Southern drawl.

The black guy, P, shakes his head and laughs deeply, then looks at Guy. He has small glistening eyes and grey stubble, and he wipes his forehead with a bright red neckerchief. ‘’s hot tonight,’ he says, his arm hanging over the guitar.

The third man decides to stand up. He walks languidly across the room to a shelf, goes to a second shelf and finds some specs there, then goes to a desk and switches on a small lamp, as if he’s finding his way around. He introduces himself as the owner, and welcomes them. It’s so wooden everywhere. The floor, shelves, walls and ceiling are all planked or clapboarded, and the smell of dryness and wood dust is overwhelming. The lights have the glow of a subdued fire. Still, Guy can see Judy’s mood is immediately lifted - these kinds of strange little worlds really inspire her. Freya’s less sure. She stands shyly behind Judy while the moustached man smiles at her, probably hoping she won’t be asked anything.

‘You come far?’ the owner says, looking over his glasses.

‘England,’ Guy says, as Judy says ‘Nashville’.

‘Right,’ the man says, humorously.

‘I mean we came from Nashville today,’ Judy explains.

‘I gathered that, mam,’ the man says, sliding a ledger to Guy. ‘You put your paw-print there,’ he says. ‘We got some rooms out back we done up.’

Guy walks with the others over the grass with a key in his hand, following a vague direction towards some outbuildings.

‘This is amazing,’ Judy says, conspiratorially. ‘I can’t believe this place - did you see the moustache on that man?’ Guy’s heartened by this, heartened that it’s probably going to be a good place to stay after all.

They pass a collection of old farm trucks, some gleaming silver Airstreams, and find their key fits a small wooden shack with a back porch and two rooms inside.

It doesn’t take long to get Freya to sleep - she’s half gone already, but Guy’s become oddly energized by this strange shack, with its dense wooden sound, its creaking floor, gingham curtains against the windows and thin single beds. Places like this make travel worth the effort. But he’s also secretly glad to know he’ll be in his own bed tonight, while Judy sleeps on the other side of the room. He’s been awkward in her company, has felt it all day, as if their silent argument has been forming relentlessly, to the point where now it seems impossible that he might share a bed with her.

His plan is to open a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and pour her a glass on the back porch - the moon is up and the cotton field beyond the yard glints silver. They can sit and drink like teenagers, hearing the insects and getting through the bottle. There’s a rocker on the porch too, painted white - he’ll let her have that. They can drink till some sort of balance is restored. An old fellowship between them.

Judy is sitting half-on, half-off a chair, with her overnight bag opened by her feet, while Guy finds the bottle. Her long hair hangs over the bag and he gets a glimpse of the things inside - the familiar objects that make her who she is. A comforting sight. He can see how tired she is in the way she leans. She has her sandals off, and her feet have a tragic look of dust and dryness - the toes look stubby and without direction, and the skin on her heels is almost cracked. Parts of our bodies age at different rates. But as he goes to place a hand on her back she straightens, looks him in the eye, and says, ‘You damn near broke Phil’s jaw.’

Guy stops, caught mid-room by her.

She stares at him, expectant, though he knows it’s not the moment to say anything. He needs to sit down, needs to find some sort of room for manoeuvre. It was the cheek in any case, he thinks, he didn’t even hit the jaw.

The possibility of any number of questions Judy might ask at this point fills him with horror - all of them naturally bend towards a complete exposé of their failing marriage, and yet this silence, this complete disregard for his feelings - it’s the first blow, and he has a real sense that he’s now involved in something way too advanced. He had made the assumption that he’d caught this thing early, but maybe he’s very wrong. Maybe she doesn’t have any feelings for him at this point. That would be terrible.

‘Honey,’ he begins, already knowing how weak and pathetic his voice sounds.

‘You don’t have to explain,’ she interrupts. ‘Phil’s already done that.’ She sits motionless, in a red-patterned dress which hangs limply to her body, draped in a sad fold between her legs. He remembers that dress the day she bought it - how she wore it in an orchard. He has a photo of that.

‘I’m not going to deny it,’ he says. This gives him the moment to sit down, but as soon as he’s done that he suspects it might be a mistake, to face her, sitting. He wants to drink that bottle - he wants to drink with her - offer her the chance to go back on what she’s said and never mention it again. But there is another force, too, the one which tells him that to live a lie like that would be nonsense, and no alternative at all.

‘Are you having an affair with him?’ he asks, sickened to say the line so many thousands have said before him, a line he never imagined he would ever say.

‘Yes,’ she says.

He takes that calmly, always so bloody good in a crisis, but he feels the heat of it and the utter awfulness, the utter finality. He doesn’t quite know what he says next. He doesn’t know if he says
oh
or nods his head - he’s thinking he must ask those formal questions, like when you’re told bad news from a doctor, questions like how long have I got and is there anything I can do and have you told anyone else, and all these questions seem to be way too considerate, way too understanding. He realizes he wants to help her, even now, when she’s telling him this awful thing, because she’s in a tricky spot and he’s always the one for her in situations like this - but he knows that he truly
doesn’t
understand, and the only question that really should be asked, the only question worth asking is
why
. Why with a man like Phil?

Her mouth tightens and she says, ‘I’m surprised at you, Guy, that a grown man should punch a man like he’s in a street fight. That’s no way to be, whatever the provocation.’

Guy listens, scalded. It’s amazing, the effortlessness by which she can turn things. What provocation indeed! But again she steals the moment. She gets up and touches him on the shoulder, and says, ‘I’m sorry, really,’ very quietly. He cannot move. Doesn’t know what to say or do. She may have rehearsed this moment a thousand times, and she’s played it magnificently, not letting him in at all. They are strangers.

She squats down by her open holdall and pulls out a small bag of make-up. He looks at her from behind, at the tiny ridge of her knicker elastic sticking through the dress, girdling her bum in a complimentary contour. At the tiny blonde hairs along the edge of her shin, the sandals with the flower buckle she bought in Florida, the tiny scar on her ankle she got on that barbed wire fence on the marshes. He wonders whether he’s already barred from that dress, from touching her, from all that she is? Is she a foreign land now?

She puts on a little make-up - a gloss, she used to call it, and he sees her take a sly glimpse at him with her compact mirror. He thinks of the night before, at the stolen reflection in the brass coal scuttle by the fireplace. And he knows that that glimpse of her in the compact mirror, distrustful and wary, is another one he will remember all his life.