“She was sitting with her hands in her lap, as stiff and straight as a woman who had been waiting at home for a tardy child, even a husband, to return. ”
Despite his best intentions, by evening of the last Saturday in November the sycamores that Reynolds had planned to have cut down were still intact and standing no less black or dominant against the whitewashed walls of the house than they had on the gloomy afternoon he had first discovered the cracks in the render. But for a few withered dun-coloured husks that remained hanging steadfastly from the topmost branches, the trees had shed their leaves, stopping up the gutters and causing the thin bruise of mold against the house’s eastern corner, which previously had barely caught the eye, to have matured in the intervening weeks to an unhealthy-looking scar that was still too fresh and too wet to have yet turned fully green.
It had rained almost every day for a fortnight. Rain had saturated the higher ground of the surrounding fields and overwhelmed the ditches, which in turn had led to floods in the park’s own drainage basin and the two large green sewage treatment tanks. For a few unpleasant days the tanks had spilled over onto the bank, fouling the land and holding up the excavation work Reynolds had planned for where the new line of caravan stations was due to be laid.
The heaviest of the rain had fallen in a single night following a day of deceptively fine weather. It was one of the weekends that Reynolds’s daughters were meant to spend with him and Sylvie, but in recent months the common understanding that had existed between their mother and him since the separation (that they would spend at least two weekends a month with their father) had been abandoned for an unsatisfying compromise. Recently, and apparently by their own choice, they had taken instead to visiting him separately and alone, Megan one weekend and Ada the next. Even then, he could not always depend upon either daughter arriving on time or at all, and more than once he and Sylvie had waited all morning for a phone call to let them know whether or not Reynolds would be needed to drive the forty miles to their house in Middleton, to pick one or the other up. The arrangement had broken down altogether at the beginning of the month when Megan, the youngest by a year and always the most stubborn of the two, had declared on the phone that she refused altogether to visit, claiming she didn’t see why she had to spend all of her free time away from her friends. Instead, she was leaving the chore to her milder, even meek, sister, Ada.
Now, due in part to the rain, neither sister wanted to visit, so Sylvie had decided that rather than waste the weekend she would take the opportunity to go see her mother, who was living in a residential home in York. She would be staying overnight with a friend just outside the city and arriving back the following night, the Sunday.
When she had set off that afternoon, Reynolds had been in the drainage hole checking to see whether any damage had been done to the sewage treatment pump. He had barely registered her leave, and later, that night, as he returned to the house from the beach, he had all but forgotten she was gone. He was wet from his swim in the sea, and tired, and the increasing volume of rain coming down about him, flashing blackly on the already overwhelmed ground, had distracted him sufficiently that as he neared the house he hadn’t notice the light in the window, and when finally he did notice, he hadn’t thought it out of the ordinary, anticipating that it was Sylvie, his wife.
The swim hadn’t been planned. He had ducked beneath the fence on a whim, and started slowly down the beach path in the dark, careful not to turn his ankle on the uneven steps that over the years the wind and rain had washed away. As a child he had made his way comfortably to the same beach without help from his sisters or his father, but now in places the rotten timber struts of the steps had disappeared entirely, leaving deep gashes of loose dirt that could only be crossed by jumping across to the steep bank and shuffling down to the next shelf, using the thick wet shrubs and roots as footholds.
Having begun his steady way down, he had not stopped until he was at the tide’s edge. In a moment he had removed his shoes and the rest of his clothing, then he was naked and walking knee-deep into the sea. He turned briefly to the black cliffs, to see whether he was being watched, but if there was anyone by the fence he couldn’t see them, only the stray patterns of rainfall against the park’s lights.
Once the waves had risen to his chest he had found he was unable to breathe. His lungs had seemed suddenly solid, and his throat constricted, tight. But when he’d ducked his head beneath the water the warmth had returned to his blood and his lungs had began to work again. He’d opened his mouth and had swallowed a great breath before diving back down into the strangely placid water, swimming further down until the palms of his hands met the bottom, which in the dark, in the cold, seemed to his touch to be sweeping beneath him, first one way then the other, never still. And he had felt, for a moment at least, that here of all places he could live, alone and forever, without in calm solitude.
He had already finished dressing and was starting the climb back up the cliff path when the cloudburst had begun. Soon, heavy streams of water were rinsing down the banks, making the dilapidated steps even more treacherous. Keeping his balance on the path proved near impossible, and when the surface of the path began to crumble then wash away beneath his weight, rushing black and shining in the night, down to the sea, he had wondered if he would make it back to the house at all. The rain stung his eyes. He fell more than once and, finally, he was forced to stop and catch his breath, kneeling in the thin oily mud, the water poring over his hands as he steadied himself. He knew under the bright lights of the house, the mud would be a bright, unmistakable orange. Sylvie would recognize immediately that it was from the cliff, and then the questions would begin. Why was he sneaking down to the beach to swim, and what if someone from the park saw him? And what was it all about anyway, this need to move, to run, to swim? What if someone saw him? What if the residents saw him? ‘My god,’ she’d say, ‘you don’t do it in the nude, do you?’ Her eyes would widen and her lips curl as though he had committed a crime.
‘No, I don’t do it in the nude,’ he would say, wandering into the kitchen to find a towel to rub the rain from his hair. He pictured her face, the anger in her eyes, knowing that she would follow him to the bathroom if he headed that way, to wait and watch while he undressed, in order to continue the argument. ‘But if I did, Sylvie, who would see me?’ he might say, trying to sound as indignant as he felt he ought. ‘Who? The beach is dark, Sylvie. It’s night. That’s why I go at night.’
‘And have you thought what you’ll do in the summer, or when it starts getting light again? I mean, are you going to keep doing it? Are you going to keep swimming, Richard? Isn’t it cold?’
‘Of course it’s cold.’
‘Then why do you do it? Why don’t you go to the swimming pool in town?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We could go together. I used to swim. Richard?’
‘It wakes me up. I don’t swim for long, just enough for-’ And that was where his argument faltered in his imagining of the scene. The truth was, he couldn’t altogether grasp why he’d done it, what he gained from it. After all, it wasn’t the first time he’d plunged into the sea. When he tried to rationalize it, there was only a numbing of his heart and his blood, and the shock of the cold. That’s all he felt. And how could he explain to Sylvie that sense of death, of peace, as the cold burned around him, the sense of sleep and calm, and surrender? Christ, even to his own ears, as he mouthed the words under cover of the rain, even to him the sentiment sounded unforgivably melodramatic. And he wondered if it was too much to ask that Sylvie would not be there when he returned to the house, that she would be in bed, trying again to sleep, putting off the row for another, a merciful, night?
He was still rehearsing the conversation in his mind when he reached the fence at the top of the path and started across the wet grass, noting, out of the corner of his eye, under the steady confusion of the rain, that the Renault wasn’t in its usual place beside the house. But even that didn’t register fully in his mind for his thoughts were running ahead of him now, ahead of this next hour, to new conversations and new arguments that would need eventually to be won.
He opened the door and stepped into the hall, called her name. The empty bearing of the house told him she was gone, and now he remembered. Thank god. The realization, however, did nothing to relieve the tightness that had pressed against his chest, his throat, as he’d struggled up the cliff. It was a tension that seemed embodied somehow by the bare unexpected light cast loosely against the opened door to the living room.
Here it was, an arc of orange lamplight spilling onto the hall carpet. And the figure of the girl in the chair, patiently watching him.
She was sitting with her hands in her lap, as stiff and straight as a woman who had been waiting at home for a tardy child, even a husband, to return. At first, he thought she might be in shock from an accident, and was here to take shelter. But then he noticed that her face and hair were dry, and knowing that, knowing she had been sitting in the house alone since before the rain had begun, convinced him in some inexplicable way that she wasn’t here by accident.
‘What are you doing in my house?’ he asked, staring at her.
She didn’t move. He hesitated a moment, before going to the kitchen to fetch a towel. When he returned she was quite still, composed even. He was going to ask her again what she was doing in his house, when she said, ‘Sylvie isn’t here.’
‘No. I know.’ He wiped his face dry. He stood there, watching her and drying his face, trying calmly to evaluate quite what he should be doing, what he should be saying. She was ill, perhaps. In some condition brought about by drugs or a breakdown. ‘I asked what you were doing in my house.’
She shook her head.
‘Do you know Sylvie?’
She was perhaps thirty, her hair short and straight and blonde. A plain face, plain clothes, a man’s clothes. He didn’t recognise her. ‘Have you come about a caravan?’ he asked.
‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘You can talk to me tomorrow,’ Reynolds said. ‘I’ll be in the office at nine o’clock.’ Reynolds was aware of the sound of his own laboured breathing, and he was aware too of the smell of mud and rain. His lips tasted sweet with sweat. Coming into the hall he had half-removed the top of his tracksuit, and it lay now sagging wetly across his shoulders and neck, revealing the whiteness of his belly. “There’ll be plenty of time to talk tomorrow. I’d like you to leave my house.’ Disguising the disquiet in his voice with something he thought resembled righteous annoyance, he added, ‘I need to get changed. Would you leave please?’
‘I need to talk to you. It’s important.’
‘Is it about a van? Do you want to hire a van?’ A little spasm of fear burned behind his eyes, and he wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘Why don’t you go home, come back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Do you need me to call someone?’ He pulled the tracksuit top back down, and wiped his face, harder this time, with his sleeve. ‘Are you listening to me?’ he said, when she hadn’t moved. ‘I said I want you to leave my house.’
He realised he was still half lost in the redundant conversations with Sylvie, in the practiced lies, when he moved instinctively down the hall to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water, waiting to hear the front door close behind him.
‘Are you okay? I mean, are you ill?’
She hadn’t moved from the chair. Her face was turned away from him, tilted down to her lap where her hands were folded neatly together.
‘They’re asleep,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘My boys. Two boys. They’re asleep.’
Reynolds found himself glancing to the ceiling, then to the door to the hall. ‘Upstairs, you mean? Here?’
‘In my car.’
Reynolds nodded. He was doing what he could to appear calm. For her, he thought. She needed him to be calm.
‘It’s the only place they sleep now. I’ve had to start leaving a blanket in the back for them, like dogs.’
Reynolds nodded, not knowing what else to do. He had finished one glass of water and was starting a second. The sweat beaded on his forehead, and water from his hair was running under his chin. It was as though she felt an entitlement to his home, his patience, he thought, watching her. This woman. She was quite calm, and it was the calm that convinced him she was unhinged, possibly insane. He nodded. ‘I think we should call someone. Who can we call?’ he said, with a new tenderness in his voice; the same sort of careful sympathy he would lend a lost child. He walked toward the window, turning the glass in his hand. ‘Will you go home? Where do you live? Are you married? I really think you should go home.’
‘I wanted to talk to you, to tell you something.’
Reynolds nodded. ‘Yes, you said that. But I think it would be best to talk tomorrow. Today you should go home, you and your boys. And tomorrow we’ll talk.’
‘I need to tell you something, Richard.’
How do you know me? Do you know my wife? Do we know you?’ He smiled, a cheerful, casual smile, then thought better of it. Too encouraging perhaps. I shouldn’t normalize this situation. This isn’t normal.
She moved a little in the chair, shifting her weight. He thought the woman was going to get up. Only for a moment. But instead, she leaned back, as though settling herself in.
‘All right. We’ll do it your way. Why don’t you tell me whatever it is you want to tell me now, then you can go home and I can go get dressed.’
Even here in the quiet of the living room he could hear the windows upstairs shaking with the wind, and he thought of Sylvie, and pictured her leaving in the Renault this afternoon, while he was in the drainage hole. Too late, he crossed to the window, looked across to the lines of caravans. The sudden idea that if there was anyone out walking a dog they might see the strange woman and Reynolds, together in the house, while his wife was away. He thought about drawing shut the curtains, but changed his mind.
Somewhere outside, a car alarm sounded, activated by the wind. The girl didn’t notice. Her attention, all of it, was on Reynolds.
‘Maybe we should check on your children first. There’s a storm. You hear the storm, don’t you?’ he asked, letting his exasperation for the first time show in his voice.
‘Did you know I was married?’ she asked.
‘I have no idea who you are. I know nothing about you.’
‘Did you know my husband was dead?’
Reynolds stopped himself from saying something unkind. He paused, sipped his water and smiled to himself. ‘No, I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.’ He looked at her, his face passive, stared very purposefully into her eyes. ‘I don’t know you, you understand. I nothing about you.’
‘It was a car crash. Your wife died, didn’t she? Your first one, Richard.’
He took some time to absorb what she’d said. He took a breath, sighed. ‘No, my first wife is called Mary. She’s alive. The girls live with her. My daughters.’
The woman looked uncertain for the first time since he’d found her here in his house. It showed itself as anger in her face.
‘You don’t have to lie, Richard. I’m not here to upset you. I just thought – I thought you’d understand.’
‘My first wife is alive.’ Reynolds was standing at the sideboard, his hand straying across the surface. His face didn’t betray anything to her. Privately, he felt more confident, as though he were winning an argument.
‘I don’t want to upset you,’ the woman said, because he had become so silent.
‘You don’t.’ He shook his head, smiling to himself at the ridiculous nature of the conversation.
‘Are you upset with me?’
‘You’re in my house. Yes, I’m upset about that,’ he said now. ‘It upsets me.’
‘Can’t we talk?’
‘We are talking,’ Reynolds said, tracing his fingers across the base of the lamp. He didn’t look up. ‘Jesus.’
‘David,’ she said. ‘That was his name. My husband.’
‘Okay.’
‘He was a year older than me, but he always seemed younger somehow. Do you know why I’m telling you this?’
Reynolds laughed a bitter laugh. His face had begun to grow red. His eyes were wet. ‘I have no idea.’ He had the intention of soothing her, trying to break her from whatever spell she was under, but he couldn’t hide his anger. It broke out every few minutes, in the tone of his voice or the look in his eye. All he wanted was for her to go away and leave him alone. He wanted to tell her so, but instead said, ‘Why don’t you tell me about him. Is that what you want? Is that why you’re here? To tell me about him?’ He looked at his watch, considered calling Sylvie.
The woman got to her feet. She was standing facing him, a slight young woman in a man’s clothes. Perhaps they were her husband’s clothes. A slender body held straight, and the face so solemn and pretty, almost perfect in its austerity. Nothing more than a lonely, and very scared, and very confused woman. And yet when she climbed out of the chair, he felt himself step back, as if in danger. ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ she said, with a tone that was disparaging had she not said it with such innocence.
‘Go on.’
‘I need to know if you stopped that night.’
‘What night?’
‘Did you stop? Was it you?’
He could have almost imagined it was the voice of a young boy now. Some humourless, painfully serious young boy he had caught stealing from the site, or one of the boys in the town’s amusement arcades who he’d found talking to his daughters once, and had looked quickly down to their feet as soon as he’d approached them. Her voice rang so clearly and confidently in the room that for a moment he tried inexplicably to find the meaning in the question.
‘I don’t understand. When?’
‘June the 24th. My husband died the next morning, just past midnight, but the accident was on the 24th. Last year.’
Reynolds was smiling out of confusion and out of sympathy. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you’re doing in my house, and I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.’ It was not unlike the arguments he had had with Mary when they were married, when the common ground between them had broken down so completely that the words each used to defend him or herself seemed to be of a separate and alien language, never to be heard or comprehended by the other. They had not wanted to hurt one another, even at the end, but it was all they had left of the love they’d known. It was a habit. While they still had the familiar arguments binding them, perhaps there was still something left, too, of the love. But it had become all too clear that the only thing they had left were the girls, and those two had enough hatred between them, hatred of their parents and the interminable rows, for all four.
‘What I’m asking you is whether, on that night, the night my husband died,’ the woman said, ‘whether after you hit my husband’s car, you called the police. You see, I remember you.’
‘You remember me? How do you remember me? How do you remember me?’
She spoke with elemental certainty. ‘You were there. I remember you,’ she said. But her eyes were now scanning the carpet, as though she had lost something.
Reynolds was aware that she was being wholly utterly sincere, but that just made him want to laugh even more. It was ridiculous, what she was telling him. Her face, in its purity, was ridiculous.
He shook his head hard, and grinned. ‘I don’t know what to say. Jesus, what are you doing here? Can you please tell me what the hell you’re doing here?’
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’
‘No. You must have remembered wrong,’ he managed to say. He saw the struggle in her face.
‘Not at the time. I didn’t remember you at the time, no. It was later. It was you,’ she insisted.
‘Later?’
‘Later, yes. Not at the time.’
‘It couldn’t have been me. I don’t know you.’
‘But later.’
‘Yes, later.’ He realised that he had become part of the conversation, his voice responding to hers, no, I don’t know, later. ‘Look, please listen to me. Are you listening? I think you must have mistaken me for someone else,’ he said, trying to break the pattern. ‘I’m not the person you’re looking for.’
‘I’m not here to blame you, Richard.’ Her eyes narrowed. Her mouth, as thin as a boy’s, her petulant lips pressed together, she said, ‘I just want to know what you did.’
‘I didn’t do anything, because I wasn’t there. You don’t seem to understand that it wasn’t me. Can’t you see this, this – it’s insane.’
‘It was your car. I remember. It was a blue green Renault Megane. I knew it when I saw it last week, in town. The colour, the rust on the wheel rims. It’s your car, isn’t it?’
‘A Megane? No. I had nothing to do with your husband. I’ve never met you before.’
He found he was smiling again, looking down to the glass, the smears from his lips against the edge. He didn’t want to smile, he wanted to be compassionate. He wanted to show her he did not think she was mad. Except she was mad. For a minute or more he didn’t even look to her, but to the glass, the floor. He rolled his shoulders and tried to remember the sensation of the rain coming down around him, the noise of the sea. Tonight, he couldn’t hate the woman, not fully, nor fully sympathize. Tonight, she merely bored him. The ludicrous conversation, her reluctance to leave, these were mere inconveniences to him, he told himself, no more. Had Sylvie been here it might have been different, the conversation might have turned into a fight, an exchange of threats. Sylvie would have thrown the woman out or called the police before she’d even had a chance to involve either of them in an argument. But alone, he felt he could put everything in perspective. There was no need for any theatrics. He could tell from the woman’s silence that for now her accusations were over. All he needed to do was wait for her to see the sense in leaving, to understand that she could get nothing from him now but his quiet tolerance, if not his out and out disdain.
He tried again. ‘Would you please get out of my house?’
‘I will when you’ve listened to me. I’ve not come to make you feel guilty, Richard. I haven’t.’
‘Stop saying my name. I don’t know you.’
‘I don’t care about guilt, I’ve had enough guilt. Don’t you think I’ve had enough guilt?’ she said. ‘I just want you to help me.’
Her voice had a quality that moved him, made the volume of his blood run slower through his body. He wanted to be moved, wanted to care. And felt himself responding to her voice, and as he watched her, stared at her very solemn, tortured face, he had the idea that at any moment he may faint. This man who had never fainted in his life. Faint right away. He wanted to lay down on the floor and sleep, alone, in the quiet of the house. Perhaps the climb up the cliff path, or the swim. His blood pressure was low. He was tired. He shouldn’t be even trying to talk to her.
‘I don’t mind you hating me, Richard,’ she continued, using his name now like a personal charm now. ‘If that’s what you’re worried about. And I won’t go to the police. I just want to come here and talk to you, we can talk. I’d like to talk to you. There are so few people to talk to.’ She paused. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’
He wanted it to be. It would, he reasoned, be a relief to say yes, you’re right. I did it. Me. But he said, ‘No.’
Yet he felt he knew the guilt as if it had been him to blame. He moved his toes in the running shoes, felt the soft creak of damp leather. What he would give to be running now, or under the water, the sea. If only he had stayed out there in the dark. If only he never had to come back to this house. He shook his head. He felt like he’d been shaking it for a couple of minutes or more, when he said finally, ‘Will you go now?’
‘No.’
‘No? You mean no you won’t go?’
‘Yes, I won’t go.’
But her energy was gone, the agonies in her eyes dimmed.
The silence that followed reminded him of something he couldn’t immediately recall. Then he remembered. The last time his daughter Ada had visited. It was the sound of her own small rebellion. The sound of someone trying not to move for fear the smallest gesture might be seen by him as a surrender: a child’s game. ‘I’ll walk you back to your car,’ he said, putting down the glass. And when he helped her up from the chair he was relieved to find the fight had left her; she offered no resistance.
They walked beneath the sycamores’ long, black limbs. The shadows against the ground like spider’s legs. And soon they were at the car. There were no children asleep in the back seat, the car was empty. He watched as the woman unlocked the door and climbed inside. The rain had stopped, and when she reversed out of the drive, and steered onto the lane, a soft breeze rolled lazily through the hedges at his side.
He had turned to walk back into the dry of the house, when the sound of an engine made him hesitate. He feared it was the woman returning to confront him once more. But the vehicle when it appeared turned out to be an old estate that approached with its headlights on full beam then stopped approximately forty yards from him. The car idled for some seconds, and Reynolds wondered if the driver was struggling with a mechanical problem. He was about to offer his help when the car reversed, the driver attempting what would prove to be a prolonged manoeuvre, made more difficult by the narrowness of the lane, which was hemmed in by two tall hedgerows of bare, dripping hawthorn. The car backed up and then turned, repeating these small adjustments until the driver had performed a U-Turn and was facing the other way.
Once the car was on its way its windows had become fogged, and it had begun to rain again, heavy now, making Reynolds shield his eyes. He hadn’t been able to see the driver clearly, but he was aware of two small heads that were just about visible in the rear window as the car drove away. The heads of two children. Boys.