The Night Following (5 page)

One by one I fed them into the flames and watched them flare and blacken and turn fragile and silvery. The garage filled with hot smoke and a choking smell, but the rhythmic lift and turn of each page as it met the flames soothed me. By the time the last one was collapsing into the pile of rectangular gray veils, I was quite calm again.

27 Cardigan Avenue
Tuesday
Dear Ruth
On entering spare bedroom couple of days ago, saw someone had been in. Whole place ransacked. Got a bit of a shock, I got straight on the phone.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t in a panic. Didn’t even ring 999. The policeman that’s been before left his card by phone and he told me I could ring him anytime I needed updating. So I did. When did the police start getting business cards?
For that matter, when did they start talking about “needing updating”? Made me sound like a 5-year old car.
He wasn’t in, of course. I got some girl. She wanted to know all kinds of stuff. When had I last left the house unattended, did I find the property secure on my return, any signs of forced entry, etc.
In the course of trying to accommodate her, I cast my mind back. I hadn’t been out since I don’t remember when. Had to get rid of her, so I said someone was at the door and put phone down.
Realized it was me, you see! A while back, searching for pressure cooker—not sure when—I must’ve upset all the packing. In haste to find it, I suppose I hadn’t noticed stuff falling all over the place. Or maybe I was just too frustrated by wild goose chase after pressure cooker to care, because I
STILL
haven’t found it. Everything from the cases is now scattered everywhere, sorry to say, including a great deal of your paper. Was surprised you’d decided to take so much of that gobbledygook (your word for it!) of yours with you, given how heavy paper weighs.
It’s all very colorful isn’t it, cruise wear. I can’t see either one of us in those colors now. I wonder I ever could.
Got to go.
After midnight or thereabouts
Got a bit upset there. To continue: on day after said phone call (see above), my policeman came again. No headway on your case—if you ask me they’ve given up. But can’t fault them on promptness this time. Just follow-up, he said. That girl I spoke to had left a few loose ends, obviously. I let him check the spare room window but he didn’t say much, only gave me more advice on locks.
Later on comes yet another, the woman from Victim Support. I’ve a feeling she’s been before. I don’t register faces much these days. She was the last straw—I let rip. Left her in no doubt what I thought of the hit-and-run bastard. She was quite shaken, I believe, didn’t stay. Good riddance.
They’re all coordinators of something, these visitors. Units, networks, support groups, you name it, they coordinate it. Must mean I’m getting the top people. Anyway I’m inundated. Keeping curtains closed doesn’t do a lot to deter.
Especially not Mrs. Marsden across the road. She pops over with alarming frequency. Is she a Mary or a Rosemary, I’ve forgotten. No, I never did know, never had cause. No good asking you now.
I can’t think what else to say so I will close now.
Bye, Arthur

After the smoke died away, my first thought was incongruously, and in the circumstances I felt unforgivably, exactly what Jeremy’s would have been. Although perhaps it wasn’t altogether strange; perhaps it was at least explicable, after more than twenty years’assimilation of his honed, palliative urges, that suddenly I very badly wanted a cup of tea. I walked slowly from the garage, rubbing my eyes.

I entered the kitchen and was at once surrounded by the smell of clean house, mildly leafy with an undertow of carpet and new bread and paint. It was as pervasive as a sound; it was the layered, burnished scent of a house not merely recently cleaned but kept, on principle, piously and improvingly stainless, as if every day I sprayed some attar of the domestic virtues—Order, Constancy, Thoroughness—into all the corners and then went around with a cloth. The worktops were wiped and shining, oranges and lemons (more than I needed, acquired for the look of them) glared from a bowl sitting next to a stack of green tins. I could see my obedient herbs flourishing in their terra-cotta containers on the decking outside the kitchen window; I could see sparrows and finches swinging at the birdfeeder. Above the slow
tack-tack
of the kitchen clock and the rising purr of the kettle I could hear a mower growling a few lawns away.

It was no good. I knew how smug and how fugitive it all was: the arranging of fruit in a display of bogus generosity, the offhand cherishing of little wild birds, the taming of gardens. It amounted to no more than the application of an unimaginative respect for hygiene, habit, sentiment, and surface. And I knew now the dangers of the fatal absence of spirit that that concealed, and how flimsy it was as armor against it; I felt afraid and nauseated, and I began to shake again. Glass will splinter as easily as it will send back a polished shine. Bodies tear, blood spills. I had just wielded a metal bar as lightly as I would flick a duster. I rushed to the back door and got myself outside just in time to be copiously sick into a pot of marjoram.

When I was calm once more, I wandered through the house. I think I was memorizing it as it was, because as soon as Jeremy came home everything would change again, though it had changed already, and I couldn’t detect what it was in the silence now that prevented it from being peaceful. What was it I couldn’t touch or see or smell or taste or hear that charged the air in every room with aggression? There had always been something about our house that made it difficult even to raise a voice. I had always kept loud noises at bay, along with dust, upsetting odors, and objects challenging to the eye. The very walls and carpets and furniture seemed to be in on it, contributing their so coordinated, so understated, solidity and hush to the solidity and hush of our marriage and its traditional patterns, its established and exquisitely intimidating courtesies. It was as if the house itself knew that Jeremy disapproved of shouting. Did I? I approved of his disapproval, certainly. Shouting meant being not just too loud, but in the wrong. Solid, hushed people such as we were did not resort to shouting. Until today, shouting was the worst thing I had ever had to apologize to Jeremy for.

It was nearly seven o’clock when I heard the Renault turn into the drive. I sat waiting in the sitting room. He came in from the garage and stood in the doorway, staring. He was holding the condom wrapper. We were both horribly embarrassed. I tried to say something, but whatever it might have been came out in a voice that I hadn’t used all day and was no more than a whisper. Jeremy’s mouth opened and closed. Then he burst into tears and turned away from me. I heard his sobs juddering as he rushed upstairs. A few minutes later came the unmistakable bumping and scraping of drawers and cupboards being emptied, and then all was quiet. About half an hour after that another vehicle, one of those scaled-down, tarted-up versions of a jeep, drew up and parked outside. The driver didn’t get out.

Jeremy struggled downstairs with our two biggest suitcases and left them in the hall. Then he marched into the sitting room and placed my car keys on the mantelpiece. Though his eyes were red, his face was again smooth, fixed with a look of aloof regret that I imagined he used for the relatives of dead patients. A heart might have stopped forever while Jeremy was in charge of keeping it beating, but that rueful, authoritative half-smile avowed that his part in any such death would always be blameless. He looked as if he knew he wasn’t in danger of shouting at me, and was proud of it.

He made a short speech about the rest of his belongings, every word of which I forgot at once. Then he paused to compose himself with some learned breathing technique, before speaking again. It didn’t take him long to deliver himself of the reasons why he was leaving me. He had tolerated years of “emotional neglect”and now (and apparently coincidental to my discovery of the condom wrapper) he had had enough. I didn’t take in the details of what he told me about his new living arrangements, which were, of course, intricately bound up with the circumstances of the driver of the waiting jeep-ette. I was too taken aback by the realization that he thought that all of this was happening because of his affair. My hammering his yellow Saab convertible pride and joy to bits, his insistence that
he
was leaving
me:
these were what he thought important. Because his affair hadn’t crossed my mind for hours, I said I simply didn’t understand why he was getting so worked up. I suppose that was what made him slam the door on his way out.

I climbed upstairs to the landing window to see him go. The front path was empty. He must have paused under the porch, maybe to wipe his eyes in the silence after the slam, more likely to check he had everything he needed. Suddenly I couldn’t bear to watch, and I closed my eyes. Then came the sound of his feet on the path and the trundle of the cases. Of course he was in a hurry to be gone. Of course they both must have been; I heard the car start before the opening and closing of the trunk and the passenger door were quite done with. I opened my eyes only at the burr of the engine at the end of the cul-de-sac, when they would be out of sight. I imagined the disappearing wisp of exhaust as they turned onto the main road and I knew that to Jeremy, as he was driven away, I was invisible now, not just physically but in the sense of ceasing to be anywhere at all, even in his mind. To Jeremy, I was not present, nor sentient; I was barely living. I was nowhere. I did not stand at this window, I did not listen, or grieve, or wonder.

But I stayed there for a long time, collecting and ordering in my mind the scrape of feet and squeak of wheeled luggage, the cough of an engine, a slammed car door, the distant mingling of traffic and birdsong above the roofs of the cul-de-sac. Sounds overheard have a deliberate music, a pacific and sequential logic that’s absent from the noise of unwitnessed behavior. Jeremy’s departure played sounds that I might want to remember one day and run over in my head, like a tune.

27 Cardigan Avenue
[date]
Dear Ruth
Did you see the car before it hit you?
This may sound harsh but Carole misses the point. I didn’t ask her inside the last couple of times she visited and again yesterday she’s on the doorstep.
This time saying she’s a bit concerned.
SHE’S
a bit concerned??? I try to tell her I
STILL
have somehow to establish whereabouts of the pressure cooker so I’m
MUCH
too busy to sit about talking to her. She says if I don’t want to talk, would I like her just to sit with me a while. Well, what’d be the good of
THAT,
forgive me for asking. That’d be an even bigger waste of time (see what I mean about missing the point?). She forgets there’s a great deal to be sorted out. Especially given the suddenness. This whole situation is all up in the air and somebody has to get a hold on matters. I have to raise my voice to get her to see that.
Next and don’t ask me how, she’s over the threshold, saying the pressure cooker seems to “represent a more important loss”and does it have special associations, and I shout yes, associations with Irish Stew start to finish in thirty minutes, veg. in under two. Or has she never heard of
TIME AND ENERGY SAVING?
When did you use it last? I seem to remember it was a wedding present.
Well hoping it turns up
Arthur

On the day after the accident I awoke to a morning full of dangers. In the shower, water broke around me like beads of wet glass on stones and my throat stiffened with steam and soap fumes. I emerged with something undesirable still clinging. I got dressed and went downstairs masquerading as a person who belonged here, a person who might have a legitimate connection with a tranquil house in Beaulieu Gardens on another sunny spring day. When I put on the kettle and poured cereal for myself, my hands shook.

I wondered if I could reinstate a former manageable smallness as the order of the day. I knew very well the advantages of going through the motions; if I didn’t do it anymore, what would I go through instead? If I didn’t, how was I going to become again what I had been for so long: absorbed, unseen, relieved?

But the air in every room I entered was suspended like breath held in anticipation of something splintering. I tried to think about housework, but I struggled to remember how I had ever been able to touch ordinary objects, for what might they become, in my hands? I could render anything and everything in the house lethal. Daylight burned on the edges of furniture, revealing them as unbearably raw. Ordinary colors punctured my eyes. I wandered the floors in fear of scalpels hidden under surfaces, of straight lines turning into blades. The emptiness of rooms glimpsed through doorways terrified me; I was afraid to walk under the lintels for fear of what I might bring in with me.

Yet I did not blunder from room to room, clumsy with distress. Despite what I felt, despite what I had done, I moved smoothly and did not disturb the quiet. It seemed I was still to appear, at least, to be part of the unchanged surface of the world. But I could never resume my old harmless life, not if I were also to be part of the new day upon whose ration of catastrophe the sun had already risen, just as it had yesterday. Because of me, a woman was dead. Somewhere, a family was in ruins.
I
was the one who deserved to be dead, they would think, and I didn’t know why I wasn’t; it seemed implausible, incredible even, that I should be able to go on breathing while disgust and hatred, justifiably without limit, mounted against me. They would want me caught and punished, of course; they would want me to suffer. The search would be already under way. Should I not simply give myself up? But whatever happened then, I wouldn’t pay enough for the woman’s life. I could never suffer as they did. Something was inadequate about the notion that any consequence less than my own death could counterweigh for hers. Something was askew, simply, in my remaining alive. It was a mistake, an oversight that should be corrected.