The Poets' Wives (29 page)

The cries of gulls blown ragged by the wind sliced through the stillness of the night before slipping into silence but their echoes lingered and she turned her eyes again to where the man fishing stood motionless at the end of the pier. Might even he not help save her son and stop him fading back below the waves? Catch him on the soft hook of her love. She strode out more quickly, reaching the end of the beach then tracing the line of rocks until she found a point where it was possible to step up on to the concrete pier. It always felt like a path that was taking you into the sea itself and there was a warning sign cautioning that it could be subject to strong waves. When they were children they had often fished for crabs off the end but she had always felt a little unsafe, frightened when the others had laughed if a sudden burst of spray showered over them.

The moon had appeared now but was soon smothered again into vagueness by clouds. The swell of the sea seemed to surge more strongly as it splashed white against the girdle of rocks on either side. She hoped that her footsteps would announce her approach because she didn’t want to materialise suddenly out of the gloom. Then she hesitated and thought of going back as she turned and looked at the lights illuminating the bar of the clubhouse. It was one of his haunts although he never played and despised all sports. Sometimes too he took an evening meal there. He did fish occasionally, if mostly without much success, and had stood in the very place that was occupied now by the solitary figure casting his arm slowly and gracefully towards the dark shift of the sea. She decided it was too late to turn back and that to do so would suggest an unwillingness to make the human contact on which the village put so much store. A few words to pass herself would be enough and then she’d return to the cottage and start to do all the things that needed to be done before her daughters arrived.

But she hesitated as some of her old childhood apprehensions returned when the sudden surge of a wave splashed a little spray around her feet. She glanced again at the figure now standing motionless and in a sudden pulse of fear imagined that it was her husband. The same height and weight, the same straight-backed stance that made it seem as if he was braced against whatever the world might throw at him. Slipping out from cloud the moon quivered the water with thin shards of light. And if he looked at her now she knew that his face would be frozen into that same anger that was the last expression he had shown her. She stood perfectly still unwilling to go another step but at that very moment the figure turned and raised his arm slowly in greeting. She couldn’t go back; she had to go forward to the end. The path seemed to have grown narrower, the press of the sea stronger. The concrete underfoot was pitted and uneven. He was wearing a waterproof coat and a woollen hat and she was near enough now to recognise his face although she didn’t know his name. As she came close he set the fishing rod at his feet and faced her, almost as if he was waiting for her to arrive.

‘Not a bad evening,’ he said, pushing his hat off his forehead.

‘Any luck?’ she asked.

‘It’s giving nothing back tonight.’ He pointed with his toe to the two tiny fish, ivory notes against the blackness of his boots. ‘The most it’s shared with me is a couple of hours of peace and quiet so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.’

‘Two small fish – all you need now are five barley loaves and you’d have a miracle.’

‘A miracle indeed if you could feed five thousand with these.’

He lifted them up and dropped them into a white plastic bag then stretched it out towards her. ‘Could you use these?’

She didn’t want them, wanted nothing more that was dead about her, but it was a kindness that she knew she couldn’t refuse so she thanked him and took the bag. Then he bent down and started to pack away his stuff. The moon slipped momentarily behind clouds once more and she stopped herself asking him if he had seen her son, if he could help her pull him back from the sea where he floundered alone and beyond her reach.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said as he stood up again, before scattering what looked like tiny boluses of bread on the surface of the water.

She thought of her son but said, ‘You knew my husband?’

‘He fished here a few times but I think he was better with words than he was at catching fish.’

‘You’ve read his work?’

‘Aye, I’ve read a couple. My son brought a book home from school. He’d a way of expressing things all right.’

There was silence for a few moments and then she thanked him again and headed back down the pier. Along the shore road there was a seam of yellow house lights, made brighter by the thickening darkness. The wind had fallen away as if exhausted by its earlier efforts and only the occasional ragged splinter of moonlight scratched the blackness of the sea. She didn’t return to the cottage by the sand dunes for fear of tripping and falling but took the longer way through the main entrance then up to the road. The fish weighed almost nothing and if it hadn’t been too late for them she would have given them back to the sea so when she reached the front door she paused for a second, unwilling to bring them inside, then took her key out of the lock and, going round to the rear garden, set the two small slivers of almost perfect white on the pyre of ash.

There was work to be done and in preparation she had brought black bin bags and some cardboard boxes. She started in the wardrobe, lifting out the clothes that hung there and folding them into the bags. There was a faint smell of must and one of the older pairs of trousers had white spots. There was too another sour smell that reminded her of tobacco although he had never smoked. The metal hangers trilled excitedly in the almost empty wardrobe. She would dump the bags at one of the local recycling points. It was a job she had already carried out at home and in truth there weren’t that many clothes he kept in the cottage. She lifted his walking boots from the bottom of the wardrobe and realised the sour smell was from the soil trapped in the grooves and ridges of the soles. Why he had stored them uncleaned in the bottom of the wardrobe she didn’t know. She held them at arm’s length and thought of all the places that he had walked in them, the same times when they were most happy together, and then sitting down on the edge of the bed remembered that he had worn them in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco when they had brought Rory home. She let them fall and stared at the way the long laces spiralled on the floor.

The Atlas Mountains, white-capped in the distance despite the trembling waves of heat that separated them from the city and where she stood on the rooftop of the small riad in which he had chosen for them to stay overnight. The call to worship, a call that she would never heed now that God had taken her only son – about that at least Don had been right – rubbed raw at the edge of her senses and she wanted to salve it with an angry spew of words and a desperate insistence that it was all a terrible mistake and when they reached him he’d greet her with his arm outstretched, the gesture that always invited her to shelter under the shadow of his love. Staring at the white peaks of the distant mountains across the pink-walled houses with their satellite dishes and rooftop washing hanging to dry. Staring across the walls of the old palace where storks nested on woven beds of sticks. Crying in a strange country where the heat of the day pressed right to the edge of the settling darkness and gave no respite or mercy. Never had she felt so far away from home and yet needed to go even further, to travel in the morning with her husband and the official from the consul to identify their son and begin his return journey. From the nearby square drifted the babble of drums and voices while in the courtyard below he sat at a mosaic-topped table lit by candles and already writing in one of the black Moleskine notebooks that he always carried with him. Already writing his loss and his pain for the world to read. Who would read hers? Who would understand the slow pulling apart of her heart until it felt as if all that existed was an immeasurable abyss into which she was free-falling without knowing when she would ever reach its lowest point?

She sat motionless on the edge of the bed and for a moment felt as if all her energy had drained away then turning her face caught her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Her hair was shapeless and pressed flat as if she had been wearing a hat, cut short and too severe, and at the age of sixty-two she had given up the trouble and expense of having it coloured. Let come what will. No man would ever desire her again but she wanted no desire except to live the rest of her life with as little pain as possible and to see her daughters happy. She wouldn’t let herself go and resolved to keep making the effort if only for their sakes but she sensed a weariness spreading through her like she had never known before. The earlier sense of lightness now seemed an illusion, a mere carrying on a temporary current of air that had fallen away, so it was with an effort of will that she made herself get up again and place the boots in a separate smaller plastic bag then knot it tightly.

There was so much more to be done before the morning – it seemed important to her to have everything cleared and aired before her daughters arrived. She didn’t want that sense of damp, of must and untidiness, lingering over what might be their last memory of the cottage. She sat on the bed as if tired again and wondered if her daughters had instinctively understood the slipping grasp of love that was their parents’ marriage and in that realisation had absorbed a reluctance to follow a similar path. It upset her to think that this might be so and suddenly drained of will she curled herself on top of the bed and faced the almost empty wardrobe.

As a comfort she told herself that in those early years, when Don was still taken by the novelty of fatherhood and had enjoyed the children, they’d given them a secure and happy childhood. C. S. Lewis had once taken summer holidays in the village and she remembered how the children gathered avidly at the cottage fire and Don would read the Narnia stories, pleased when they wouldn’t allow him to stop. A lifetime away. She looked at the black bin bags and the empty wardrobe that suddenly seemed cavernous and tried to remember how it felt when love first invited you to step inside and share its mystery but the welter of the intervening years made it impossible to recall that first flush of light, the sense of stepping where no other footsteps had ever smirched the snow. Then she got off the bed and grabbed the last item – his blue dressing gown – and knew if it had been a film she would have pressed it to her face and inhaled the vestiges of the loved-one but instead, already feeling angry at the foolish fancy of her earlier imagination, held its clogged and matted mustiness at arm’s length, then quickly bundled it into a bag where it bulged outwards against a tear in the over-stretched plastic.

She carried the bags out to the car and threw them in the back – there’d be time to leave them off before her daughters’ arrival. They smudged against each other like giant plums with their skin bruised and leaking. When she went inside again she sat down at the fire with another glass of wine. She would have liked to burn everything but it wasn’t physically possible and would have taken too long, not to say risk setting the chimney on fire. It was when the children had grown older that he had lost interest in them, when they no longer needed him and slowly realised that after all he wasn’t Aslan. He had become a kind of commentator on their lives rather than a participant, watching from an increasingly remote and critical position, forever prone to the same complaint that no one told him anything. She could never forgive him for the disappointment he had felt in them whatever they achieved and how at times he had deliberately let that disappointment, even when it was unspoken, leach into their consciousness.

He’d driven them away, driven her children away from her so that all of them had sought lives far from their home. She told herself that was why Rory had died in the Atlas Mountains, that it was his father who was to blame that he had died in such a place, so far away and beyond the reach of her love. A young man who had climbed Mont Blanc on his twentieth birthday, who had walked in high places and completed some of the less difficult climbs in the Himalayas, dead as a result of a fall from a path where every day middle-aged out-of-breath tourists safely followed their guide. Late at night and on his own: it was decided that he’d somehow lost his footing and hit his head on a rock as he slid down the steep scree. A child herding goats had found him in the morning, his body so unmarked the boy had thought him merely sleeping. A tragic accident, the authorities had called it, and quietly led them to believe that it had been a dangerous choice to go walking at night and that his purpose in doing so would always be unknown. Her son dead amongst the stars and the snow-caps of distant mountains. She knew she was going back. After everything was finally done and this last business settled she would return to that very place because she needed to go there without her husband, without his book in which he wrote over her grief with the public permanence of his own. Somehow if it was only her, and with all the love that her memory of her son burnished every day, she knew she would be able to evoke him into even momentary life again, finally bring him home.

She forced herself to stir, was clear-headed enough to know that self-pity would bring nothing but a paralysing loss of will. She promised herself that she wouldn’t drink any more wine – there was too much work to be done – and she started by piling the shelves of books into cardboard boxes, occasionally separating some that belonged to her, or one that she wanted to keep. When she reached the collections of other writers’ poetry she checked each one and if any was a signed copy or had a dedication she set it aside. She would take the rest to the second-hand bookshop in Belfast near the university and donate them. She’d organised them in the boxes carefully with their spines up so that the girls could peruse them and take anything that caught their fancy. But she didn’t imagine they would – not even the yellowed and grubby Narnia paperbacks that somehow had managed to linger on despite the intervening years of neglect. Her daughters didn’t seem to do nostalgia or looking back and she wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing.