Your Father Sends His Love (14 page)

‘Did you . . .' she says as she watches the white mush smooth through the holes of the masher. ‘Did you have a Mars Bar the other day?'

He takes a chunk of cucumber and pops it in his mouth, his face as guilty as an apple scrumper's.

‘A Mars Bar?'

‘Yep, you know, work rest and play.'

‘No, no, I don't think so. I don't remember having one.'

‘There was a wrapper in the car this afternoon.'

She doesn't look up at him, but down at the mash, trying to get out all the lumps.

‘Actually, yes. I remember now. I had one the other morning. I felt a bit light-headed, so I bought one at the newsagent's. Why do you ask?'

Evie hooks a shank of hair behind her ear, her face pink from the exertion of mashing.

‘I couldn't remember you ever eating one that's all.'

‘When I was a child a friend of my dad's gave me some chocolate-covered Turkish delight and I was sick all night. But I was in the newsagent's and I thought the sugar would do me good.'

Evie looks at him as she spoons mash onto the plates. When she is full she cannot imagine ever eating again, cannot bear the sight of other people tucking into big dinners. No, not Jim. Never Jim.

The boys leave most of their salad and the usual bargaining ensues. They are good kids; she says this to herself and means it, but teatime is trying. She lets Jim be the bad guy this time, as cucumber and beetroot are counted into mouths, quarters of boiled egg passed between plates. Eventually she calls time and they are allowed to choose
a yoghurt each from the fridge. Jim stacks the plates and puts them by the sink.

‘Who'd like a walk after dinner?' Jim says. ‘We could go up to Bluebell Wood.'

‘
Dad
,' Chris says.

‘Will you go in goal for us when we get back?' Phil says. Little Flip.

‘We'll see,' he says. Always, we'll see.

‘Just for half an hour?' Chris says.

‘We'll see.'

The small back garden looks out over a series of fields leading to a farm at the crest of a hill. They duck under the barbed wire at the back of the garden and walk along the path beside their neighbours' houses. The boys kick the football
Keega
n
/
Toshac
k
/Keega
n/
Toshack
as they pass it between them. Sun fades over the hill. Evie holds Jim's hand as they walk, having slipped it into his when offered. We are all detectives.

Jim stops by the stile on the way into Bluebell Wood. The boys are running ahead, hoofing the ball high into the air and trying to head it on its descent.

‘In the paper today,' Jim says. ‘There was an interview with a woman who should have been on that plane that crashed in June. You remember? She's been in hospital for months, can't cope with it, mentally I mean. She saw the
plane come down, she said. Before the flight. She saw it and refused to get on. Imagine that.'

‘Amazing,' she says, looking up ahead to the boys.

‘People who see things,' he says. ‘Get premonitions. You never hear about those that got it wrong, do you? Only those that got it right. Every time there's a plane crash there's always someone who “saw” it, who got the feeling the plane would go down.' He steps down the stile. ‘And cancelled their ticket. How many people do that a day, I wonder? How many seats go empty because some passenger has a
feeling
?'

‘I can't imagine.'

‘It can't be insignificant.'

‘Someone I met once was convinced there'd be a nuclear war by 1980,' she says. Ross. After the CND March, around a small table in a Manchester pub, after the biting March cold, and him leaning into her saying: ‘I would like to see you again. Soon. There is no time to be wasted.'

Jim stops.

‘Just because a button's there doesn't mean it'll be pressed.'

‘He thought the opposite.'

Jim shakes his head.

‘Well, I feel sorry for him, then. To live every day as if it could end before sun-up or sun-down. Imagine that.'
He smiles at that. She puts her hand in the back pocket of his jeans.

The bluebells were startling in the late spring, but now are dead-headed and a drained shade of purple. There is a rope swing over a small gulch that the boys have been scared off using with a cautionary tale about the kid who is now pushed around town in a wheelchair. They walk along the narrow pathway; there are cigarette ends and cans of beer and she hopes they will not stumble upon a condom.

She'd asked Ross to leave it off just once. He had refused. It would be wrong, he said, even to countenance the creation of a new life in this dying world. All she wanted, she said, was to feel him inside her properly, just once; was that so wrong?

Evie still has her hand in Jim's back pocket. Chris is holding the football and Little Flip is trying to get at it.

‘Stop that,' Jim says. ‘And watch out for stinging nettles.'

They circle the wood and the gulch stinks, spindly creatures on its scummy top, the rope swing idling in the breeze. Jim leans down to kiss her neck. He will want sex tonight. The thought is not unpleasant.

When she dreams of her unborn child, which is too often and not enough, she is sometimes able to take the dream in hand and keep it reeling. It is precarious, but
she can hold the baby for longer, concentrating on her as the fantasy fades. She is then awake and alone. She goes to the bathroom to piss and knows that the seat will be down because Jim understands that this is one of those things. Good boy, he is.

Philip and Chris are in bed and the front room is messy with toys. She puts them in the big wooden box Jim made. He is in the kitchen, the kettle whistling, the paper spread out on the table open at the crossword. He puts two cups of tea next to the paper and sits down. She sits beside him and takes in the half-complete crossword. He reads out clues he has not yet solved. She always holds out a faint hope that a clue might be repeated, that he will read it out and she will be able to say ‘we've had this one before', but the clues are always new and always unguessable. Perhaps Ross is wrong about technology defeating boredom: Jim is never bored by the crossword.

The phone rings as they fill out the penultimate clue. The sound is still a surprise. Neither of them saw the point, save for emergencies, and there's a phone box at the end of the road. But in the end, they got one anyway.

‘What the devil?' Jim says. What he always says when it rings.

‘I'll get it,' Evie says and goes into the hallway. She
picks up the receiver and answers with a curt hello. Jim always reels off their telephone number, posed as a question. There is silence on the other end of the line and then pips.

‘Evelyn, I need to see you,' Ross says. ‘It's important.'

‘Oh, hello, love,' she says. ‘Kids down, are they?'

‘Tonight,' he says. ‘Meet me tonight?'

‘No, no,' she says. ‘Mine are down. Though the little horrors are probably reading comics by torchlight.'

‘I'm not fucking about, Evelyn. I need to see you. I need to see you tonight.'

‘No, I'm not sure I can do that; we're off to bed soon.'

‘I wouldn't ask if it wasn't of the utmost importance.'

‘Well, I'll talk to Jim and see what he says. Can't promise anything, though.'

‘Meet me at the Swettenham Arms at nine.'

‘Well, I'll ask and I'll see what I can do.'

The phone goes dead. She replaces the receiver and smears her thumb across its top as though removing fingerprints. She goes to the bathroom and locks the door, sits down on the closed toilet seat.

The weakness, the self-delusion of men. She has been fortunate, though. He has been a distraction and nothing more, the kind of affair that you read about in magazines at the hair salon. Over now. Before anything goes awry.
She flushes the toilet and eyes the telephone as she passes, daring it to ring again.

Jim is writing letters in a circle, trying to unpick an anagram. He looks up and she sees the man she loved and the man she loves. He takes off his spectacles.

‘Was that Kath?' he asks.

She sits down at the table and picks up her tea, blows on it.

‘She wants me to meet her at the Swettenham Arms. Another crisis, I suspect.'

He kneads his eyes, looks at his watch.

‘It's coming up to nine o'clock,' he says. ‘Can't she wait until tomorrow?'

‘It'll only be for an hour or so.'

‘That woman lives in perpetual crisis. She's like the Middle East. Like the bloody Lebanon.'

‘I know,' she says. ‘But you know what Jeff's like.'

‘You go,' he says, his eyes back on the wheel of letters. ‘Counsel your flock.'

She kisses him on the top of his head and he looks up and smiles. She thinks of the Mars Bar again. Him eating it on the way out of the newsagent's.

‘Do you often get light-headed?' she says.

‘What?' he says.

‘You said you got light-headed and that's why you had that Mars Bar. I just wondered if it happens a lot.'

‘Not really,' he says. ‘Sometimes, but it happens to everyone, doesn't it? It was nothing, just leaving the house without breakfast, that's all.'

‘I've told you I don't mind making—'

‘I know, but I can sort my own breakfast out. I'm not a hopeless case, you know?'

‘I know that, love. But still—'

‘I'm fine, okay?' he says. ‘It was just the once.'

‘Yes,' she says. ‘I just worry, that's all.'

‘Go and worry about Kath,' he says.

She kisses him.

‘See you in bed,' he says.

In the car she pauses with the key in the ignition. She never wanted an affair; she only wanted a lover. The way the French do it; the gentility of a marriage with an outlet for unspent passion. But there is nothing French about this, nothing elegant.

She pulls out of the driveway and takes a left at the end of the road. She realizes she hasn't said goodbye to the boys. She almost turns back.

‘Do not die,' she says. ‘Do not have an accident.'

The Swettenham Arms is a grotto; a thatched roof and wattle and daub. It looks inviting, like a coach house from
an old book. The kettle's boiling, she says, as she parks the car.

He is sitting in the snug, a glass of beer in front of him. Evie goes to the bar and orders a gin and tonic. She sits down at the small table. He is smoking and she is smiling, dumbly.

‘I told you never, under any circumstances, to call the house,' she says, still smiling.

‘I needed to see you,' he says. He is not looking at her but down at the ashtray.

‘I must be mad,' she says.

‘There is only madness,' he says, finally looking up. The beard and the eyes; the curl of smoke. ‘That's all there is.'

‘You're drunk, aren't you? Drunk and bloody stupid.'

He takes a sip of his drink then takes her hand. She pulls it away.

‘You risk everything for me,' he says. ‘Everything. And all I do is talk. I talk and talk and you listen and nothing changes. I've been thinking about it since you left. Nothing else. And it can't wait, not another moment.'

Ross tries to put his hands on hers again and again she quickly moves hers away. She wonders whether something has unhinged him; whether he has always been unhinged.
Idiot.
She says it out loud and he looks at her, laughs and shakes his head.

‘Yes,' he says. ‘Yes.'

He looks at her fixedly now. ‘Listen,' he says. ‘Listen.'

He stubs out his cigarette, rubs his hand across his mouth.

‘I want you to leave Jim,' he says. ‘I want you to leave Jim with the boys and come and live with me.'

She laughs; head angled back, exaggerated.

‘I want to have a child with you,' he says quietly. ‘Our own child. Just ours.'

She has a taste like aspirin in the back of her throat. He is holding her hands suddenly, and she does not pull hers back, not straight away. Such blue eyes, such a scrabbly beard. How beautiful a girl would be with his eyelashes. The air is warm and muggy. Somewhere there are bombs.