Twenty-Six

I woke on the morning of Wednesday 15 February with a sense of imminence. There had been rain for days – the lawn was bloated with it – but the weather was suddenly cold and bright. From my back window the spire and the television mast on Highgate Hill looked unnaturally clear. The everyday objects in my kitchen were different, charged with meaning. My skin prickled. It was as if every object that I looked at was illuminated from behind, its outline accentuated and made harder, more vivid. Myself, too. I felt capable, precise. I needed to do things.

I had shopped the day before and was partly prepared. On the table I placed my heavy scales and weights, a bag of wholemeal flour and a bag of strong white flour, small polythene bags of pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and sesame seeds, yeast like soft modelling clay, sea salt, vitamin C powder in an orange medicinal pot, a plastic bottle of grapeseed oil, a bag of hard, thick muscovado sugar. This was a process I could go through in subconscious bliss. The yeast awoke with jewelled bubbles. I forked the salt into the sandy wholemeal flour, then added everything else with the beery puddle of yeast. I smoked cigarettes in the garden for half an hour, not thinking of anything, then returned and mashed and kneaded the two large patties of dough, leaning on the heels of my hands, folding and folding. Cut, rolled, pushed into four tins. of ring binders and the clatter of filing cabinets. We were now only a day or two from achieving perfect order, like Pompeii. It would be almost a pity to disturb the taxonomic perfection with any new work.

Duncan was engrossed with the technicalities of the espresso machine, one of our major capital expenditures in the boom days of the late eighties. He brought me over a thimbleful of coffee which gave me an almost instantaneous jolt of caffeine as I despatched it in a single, tiny gulp. He told me of his new scheme which he was discussing with the council for putting homeless families (‘homilies’ he camply called them) into derelict houses and enabling them to restore the buildings themselves. I nodded with enthusiasm. It was extremely cost-effective (except for us), practical, socially beneficial, had little to do with architecture in any traditional sense, and was almost certain to be rejected out of hand by the housing department. An ideal CFM project. Then we moved on to my hostel.

‘I read about the torchlight procession of local residents in the local paper,’ Duncan said. ‘Your allaying of the anxieties of the community obviously wasn’t a total success. Does that mean that the hostel scheme has been abandoned?’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘A council lawyer has come up with a slightly underhand way of pushing it through. Because of the fight at the meeting and the arrest that followed it, there’s a court hearing coming up. The ruse is, as far as I can understand it, that the matter is all sub judice, which means that we can’t respond to questions on the issue. Or at least that’s what we’ll say. Meanwhile, the plans are moving towards completion. The objectors will end up having to deal with a hostel that is up and running and that will bring its own problems. Local residents attacking arrogant council officials and a modernist architect is one thing. That would go down well in the local press. Nimbys assaulting the mentally ill who have been returned to the community is another. Anyway, that’s the grand strategy.’

‘Did you explain to them that if these people weren’t in their back yards, they would be on their pavements and in their shop doorways and public benches?’

‘No. Events intruded.’

The meeting was adjourned in fairly good spirits and I returned to my desk where I smoked cigarettes and tapped my phone with my pencil and realised I wasn’t doing anything and that maybe I had better leave. I had the conviction that I was seeing everything with extreme clarity and that I had other places to be and other things to do. Gina asked after my health but I was unable to pay proper attention to what she was saying and I left, without even saying goodbye to Duncan. I would explain everything later.

Back at home, I opened a bottle of red wine and I stood on a chair and looked through a cupboard and found some salted cashew nuts and a rolled-up quarter of a bag of pistachio nuts and a little packet of scampi-flavoured somethings that were a bit like crisps. That would do for my supper. I drank the wine and ate these bits of crisps and watched TV and flicked between channels. There was a quiz show with questions I found elusive, a local news broadcast, an American science fiction show that I assumed must be Star Trek but turned out not to be, not even the new Star Trek. There was a programme about albatrosses, the long journeys they take navigating on the trade winds and the lifelong devotion the albatross shows to its mate, and a comedy show set in an American high school, and then another news programme.

After I had watched too many of these programmes, I switched the sound off and rang up the Stead because I wanted to talk to Martha but somebody else answered and took me by surprise. It was Jonah and he spoke in a very calm official sort of voice and told me that Martha had sunk into a coma in the morning and then had died very quietly that afternoon. I tried to ask some questions, not wanting to break the connection, but Jonah said he was sorry but he had to go. On the television I saw a man in a grey suit silently opening and closing his mouth like a fish in a bowl. I had to phone somebody. I rang Claud and got an answering machine. I rang Caspar and a woman answered and I hung up. And I rang Alex Dermot-Brown and Alex answered. He was surprised and said at first that we had a session the next day and asked if it couldn’t wait but after I had talked a bit he told me to come straight over and asked if I was all right about getting over on my own or should he come and get me. I insisted and cycled over without a hat or gloves, though there was already rime on the car windows.

Alex looked very slightly different when he opened the door. Although this was where I had always seen him and he never dressed up, I felt like a schoolgirl calling on her teacher at home, illicitly, after hours. He greeted me with obvious concern. He spoke quietly and I could hear voices from the kitchen downstairs. I dimly realised that I might have interrupted something but I wasn’t in a position to care. He led me up to his room. I asked something about the children. He said that they were asleep, way up at the top of the house and I didn’t need to think about them. He put the light on and it dazzled me. With the darkness outside and the brown cosy illumination in the hall and on the stairs, it seemed clinical and interrogative. I lay on the couch and he sat behind me.

‘Martha’s dead,’ I said.

I was breathing deeply and deliberately as I had in earlier times on board ship while struggling not to vomit. Alex waited a long time before speaking and when he did he was gentle but determined.

‘I want you to think again of the day when Natalie disappeared,’ he said.

It was more than I could bear.

‘I can’t, Alex, I can’t.’

Suddenly, he was kneeling beside me. I could feel his sweet warm breath against my cheek, his hand was on my hair.

‘Jane, this woman you dearly loved has died. I know what you are suffering. But you haven’t come to see me in order to be comforted. You want to use this emotion. Am I right?’

‘I don’t know what I want to do,’ I said, and I knew that all resistance was gone.

‘Let’s do it then,’ he said.

Alex spoke the soft, soothing words that were now a familiar incantation, like half-heard music from a distant room. I experienced a profound relief in letting my body relax and my will slacken and I was there. This time I really was there. The charred moss against my back, my thighs resting on tiny twigs and stones. As I stood up and brushed my dress down I could feel the marks they had left in my flesh, like a raffia mat on the back of my thighs. The sun was lost behind a cloud and it left the River Col in heavy shadow. The stained, shadowy surface rippled lethargically and drifted away. The twisted torn paper fragments were gone, along with the childish fantasies they had represented. That was all over.

I turned, shivering in the flurries of wind, drops of moisture threatening rain, that now blew against me. The black dress was pressed against my body, my sexually awakened body, the breasts and thighs now somebody else’s as well as my own. I felt a cold clarity of purpose. Cree’s Top was ahead of me, the river lapping down on the bank by my right foot. I began to run up the narrow, steep path and into the wood and gorse that covered this lump of nature. There were sounds, not of birds or of the wind or the stream but strange creakings and whistlings and groans. I paid them no attention. I ran and could hear myself panting and feel the pain in my constricted chest. The trees around me looked dead, the bushes bare, the river below me on my right, brown and sluggish. My duty now was not to think and reason but to proceed regardless. Branches scratched my face, thorns tore me, my clothes snagged. I had reached the summit of Cree’s Top and ran across and began to make my way down the slope on the other side. On Natalie’s side. Through the bushes ahead I saw movement, fragmentary glimpses between branches, I heard screams, unintelligible shouts. My decision had already been made. I ran forward and burst through the bushes into the sunlight.

For the first moment I could see nothing with the sun burning my eyes, nothing but speckled gold explosions. I narrowed my gaze and forced myself to look. It was clear. Simultaneous perceptions: A girl lying on the grass. Screaming and screaming. Natalie. Dark hair, flaming eyes. Held down. Above her was a man, his hands about her throat. Her arms and legs flapped uselessly, then slowed and stopped. I tried to shout but it was as if my mouth was stopped with ashes. I tried to run, but my feet were stone blocks. The girl was let fall and lay still. The man had his back to me. He was dark haired, not grey. He was slim not stout. He was clean-shaven, not bearded. But there was no doubt. It was Alan.

Suddenly, I was screaming and screaming and I was being gripped and it was Alex and he was holding me tight and whispering in my ear. I pulled myself up. My hair was streaked over my face. I was spent. I had been skinned and turned inside out. I said I was going to be sick, now, and Alex reached for the wastebasket and I retched and then vomited and vomited, emptying myself. I lay back on the couch, stretched out, helpless, snotty, spots of vomit on my face, tear-stained, groaning, crying, gasping. Utterly spent, disgraced, appalled.

I felt a voice, intimate in my ear:

‘You got there, Jane. You’re all right. You’re safe.’