The Treatment (58 page)

Sometimes he could see their future quite clearly. Sometimes it looked like a long, open road. But other times, in Rebecca's sudden silences, in her bursts of laughter, her flashes of false bravery, he knew it wasn't going to be easy. He knew they couldn't reinvent their story overnight. Still, he smiled at her and loved her and held her hand when she was asleep at night and in the mornings sat on the bath edge talking to her as she bathed, watching her lather shampoo into her hair and massage her scalp with her strong fingers.

She bought a ridiculous man's Panama hat from an Oxfam shop, rolled up joints and stuck them in the hatband, interspersed with cow parsley. She looked bonkers, he told her. “Like an eccentric ivory dealer, or something.” In Kings Lynn she bought strange lilies and white poppies
and took them back to the B&B, put them in a jam jar and made a big painting of them out on the lawn as the sun went down. On the second day they walked for miles, through the ancient land where once sand blows could cover whole villages, through the old, abandoned rabbit farms, past mysterious, ever-moving sinkholes. They talked about the dreams they could buy if he sold the house: “Now that you've really moved on, Jack”—the blue futures they could sign up for with her money and his freedom. He could buy a flat in Thornton Heath without a mortgage, she could buy a cottage in the country somewhere, in Surrey, maybe, or something bigger out here in Norfolk. They could have a holiday—“Somewhere like South America,” she said. “Or Mexico, I could get really precious about the muralists.” On and on they went. Rebecca in her crazy hat and Caffery quiet at her side, thinking,
I can't, Rebecca, I can't.

As the sun began to set they stopped for a moment, on the slope above a shallow valley. The oblique, orange rays found a reflective surface in the trees on the other side of the valley, something artificial, a piece of glass, or a window maybe, and suddenly, as if a spotlight had swung round, a reflected image of the sun shot across the land toward Caffery and Rebecca, dipping their faces in gold. A trailer, he saw now, it was a trailer reflecting the light, and with a numb jolt he realized it was standing above the quarry near Lamb's garage. He hadn't realized how close they'd been all day. It made him want to take Rebecca straight back to the B&B, away from here.

“You're wavering,” Rebecca said suddenly. “You're not going to sell the house—I can tell.” She didn't look at him as she spoke. She stood at his shoulder staring at the sunset. “You've changed your mind about Ewan.”

“No, I haven't.” He reached for her hand. It was time to go. “I haven't changed my mind.”

“You have. You want to go and see Tracey in Holloway again.”

“I don't. Really, I don't.”

But he was lying. Of course he was lying. He couldn't explain it to her. He couldn't explain that everything he
saw on the flinty, sandy heathland where they walked, everything he saw and everything he did, still made him think about Ewan. If anything it was worse out here, all this way from London. They drove back to the B&B in silence and Rebecca didn't mention it again all week.

Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, one morning he woke up with the impression that Ewan had walked into the room.

He sat up. The clock said six-twenty, the sun was outlining the flowers on the curtains, and next to him Rebecca was asleep. He looked around the little B&B room, confused, his heart thumping, fully expecting to see Ewan sitting in the window seat, dressed in his mustard T-shirt, shorts and Clarks sandals, swinging his legs. “Ewan?” Everything seemed different. Everything in the room seemed to have a weightlessness, everything seemed to have become detached from its meaning. His limbs were light, as if he had been carrying a heavy object and had just released it. He felt as if he might float up toward the ceiling.

“Ewan?”

“Jack? What is it?” Rebecca, half asleep, dropped her hand on his back and idly scratched his shoulder blades. “What's up?”

“Nothing.” He dropped his head back on the pillow and put his hand over his chest, over his thumping heart. “I had a dream, I think. That's all.”