What the Eye Doesn't See Page 15

  And it was then that I saw a yellow dot which was bigger than the buttercups and I thought it was moving in the distance, and I screwed up my eyes, and stared into the sun, and saw Max’s yellow Deux Chevaux, lurching along the bumpy track which leads across the fields. I ran down the track towards the car, stumbling in the ruts, and crying with relief. Max was cramped into the car with his head dropped forward, like a bull ready for the charge, and Lucía was not with him. I wanted him in my arms but he did not stop the car so I ran after it, banging on the roof. When he pulled up outside the cottages he did not get out, so I opened the door. He was sitting inside, quite still, staring. I put out my hand to him, tugging at his sleeve, but he did not move.

  Theodora came to look at him sitting silently in the car, staring ahead of him. ‘Shock,’ she said. ‘Tea.’ We went inside to make tea, but in the end we never offered it to him, but we sat on the wall and drank it ourselves, watching him still sitting in the car. Theodora suggested that perhaps we should slap him, because he might be suffering from some form of hysteria, and then we went down to the car and tapped his face, but with no result. Feeling a sudden sense of anger and frustration, I pulled hard at his arm, and when he still did not move, I pushed him hard in the other direction. The weight of him yielded under my hands, but it was clear that he didn’t even know I was there. What I wonder now is why we never called the doctor – I suppose we were ashamed. Madness, mental illness, nervous breakdown, even then, in the early seventies, were words that could hardly be spoken.

  When Freddy arrived back from London, she stood next to the car with her hands on her hips. ‘What in God’s name is the matter with him?’ she said, and leaning into the car, she caught hold of Max and pulled at him hard. ‘Oh really, Max, how can you?’ She wrapped her arms right around him and pulled and he tipped forward and started to slide, and as the side of his face went down onto the tarmac he didn’t even put out a hand to protect himself but lay on his back, quite still, his blue shirt open at the neck, and his sleeves rolled up, his eyes looking up at the sky, and in the evening light our long shadows tipped down over him.

  ‘We’ll have to get him inside,’ Freddy said. ‘We won’t be able to do it ourselves. We’ll have to get Jack.’ Theodora took the car and went down to get Young Mr Medlock, who didn’t seem particularly surprised to find Max lying in the lane and he tried to help Freddy to lift him but Max, although slim, is heavy. ‘A wheelbarrow,’ Jack said. Freddy went to fetch the wheelbarrow while I knelt in the lane next to Max.

  ‘Go inside and make up a bed for him,’ Freddy said to me and so I went up to the cottage door, and when I looked back I saw that Jack had lifted Max’s body into the wheelbarrow and with Freddy supporting his legs they were struggling up the garden path. In the midst of the appalling, there is always the absurd.

  The next morning Max remembered nothing of this. He got up and refused to stay and got in the car and went back to London – all he told us was that Lucía was dead, and it was only later that we learned what had happened … and he threw away her clothes, and her books, and the scarves she wore in her hair, and his guitar. He threw away everything except for the bed, because we fought for the bed, and Freddy and I went to London to get it, and brought it home in a van, as something for Maggie …

  For, of course, she had to come to us, there was nowhere else for her to go, and those first days she ran around on the lawn, unaware, holding up dandelion clocks so that the wind blew away the fluff on them … and we were in despair, wondering how we would cope, but it was not long before we saw her as a blessing, a second chance which arrived at a time when our lives were wearing thin – but she, poor child, had only the shallow soil of our grief in which to put down her roots, and yet somehow she thrived. Always she has been an adult, and always she has been relatively unaffected by the strange, twisted state in which Max lives … Except now I fear it is no longer so.

  Maggie has never known her father – she never saw him at the front gate, waving goodbye before he went away to Spain, she never knew him before the money, and the women, and the drink … and I do not know him now either, but I have learnt to understand grief and how it warps and corrupts character, for I have seen it work out its bitter course and felt the deep furrows which it drags across the heart, and how it breaks a crack through the foundations of life, so that the pain is passed on through generations.

  After a loss such as that life is unkind, and so we do not speak of the Wheelbarrow Afternoon and its various deaths. I have been waiting so very long for him to come home.

  Maggie

  On Friday evening Adam meets me at Waterloo Station.

  ‘So how’s the job?’ he asks.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I mean, how am I to judge if it’s the right job for me? I’m floundering around the place, really, aren’t I? Just like everyone else, although some of them won’t admit it. In the past people had faith. But now the only God is the media, watching us, and dictating its Sunday Colour Supplement values. We read articles about people who are rich or beautiful, and even if the rational part of our minds knows their lives are as small and messy as our own, we want to be like them. And that’s the most we’ve got to hope for – that one day we’ll finish up in a Sunday Colour Supplement article. Terrible, isn’t it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Maggie, Maggie. I only asked how your job is going,’ Adam says.

  ‘Yes, sorry. Sorry. Hello. That’s what I was meant to be saying, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And hello to you as well.’ He kisses me and takes my bag.

  It is always the same when we meet after a gap of one or two weeks. He’s never quite as I remembered him. Always I have to spend a few minutes reconciling the perfect image that grows in my head with the reality of him. Always I think – just for a minute – oh, it’s only you.

  ‘I don’t think things are really as complicated as you make them,’ he says.

  We walk out into the rain together under his umbrella.

  We go back to his flat and he cooks supper for me.

  I long for a bath but there isn’t one here, only a shower.

  I had put on sensible clothes for Adam and it feels good to take them off. As I stand under streams of hot water, he pulls back the curtain and comes to stand beside me. He’s white without his clothes, like something newborn. I watch the water falling down over me, bouncing off my arms, and dividing into rivulets as it flows down my legs. I move back so that he can stand under the water. Then he pulls me towards him, and rests his chin on the top of my head, and we stand together with the water running down in the gaps between us, with white tiles around us, and the sound of the water splashing down over our feet.

  In bed he kisses my breasts where the weight of them lies between us. Then he kisses my belly button and the inside of my leg. Two candles burn on the bedside table. The curtains are shut, their linings enclosing us in a white cocoon. Long-term relationship kind of sex – have a bath, clean your teeth, switch the lights out, do it all very tidily underneath the sheets.

  I shut my eyes and listen to the sounds – the ripping open of a condom, the quickness of his breath, the rustle of sheets as he moves me beneath him. The soft hair of that cropped head brushes against my thighs. His hands tickle me and I laugh – but quietly because I’m worried that he won’t like me laughing. Then the slapping of his flesh against mine, the pressure of him deep inside me. I’m in love with the fact that he wants me so much. Nobody has wanted me like this before.

  And this is all fine, I like it, and inside me that tension builds, the floodwater rising against the dam. But my mind is still sniggering in the back row. I want to be able to have sex, not make an idea out of it. But my head won’t shut up and I’m thinking – what’s the point of this? What are we trying to achieve? A muscle spasm, that’s all. But of course it must be something more or what is all the fuss about? This should be the route into some other world, like Dougie’s drugs, or those mystics Nanda reads about. Except t
hat for me sex has never had any wider resonance.

  Instead what I think is that his penis inside me carries with it the echo of other penises, not that there have been many of them – usually my relationships don’t get that far. But his penis – those other penises – are all the same. They’re all digging deeper and deeper, burrowing inside me, all in pursuit of something that just isn’t there.

  Afterwards he lies beside me, stroking my hair. ‘I think we’re pretty good at this, don’t you?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘But we need more practice, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So we practise some more.

  Then he gets up to go to the bathroom and I hear him washing his hands.

  When he comes back I ask, ‘Adam, do you think that two people can ever like all the same things?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just thinking.’

  ‘Actually, no,’ he says. ‘I think relationships are like two overlapping circles. You know, like Venn diagrams in maths at school.’

  He gets into bed beside me and, lying on his front, he traces the shape of two interlocking circles with his finger on the sheet. ‘There are some things in the overlap, and some things only in the circles, and you just have to make sure there’s always enough things in the overlap.’

  ‘Uum, yes perhaps.’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘I suppose I thought that some relationships might be like an eclipse, with one circle fitting perfectly over the other.’

  He moves across me, and matches his arm to mine, and puts his hand on top of mine. I line up our fingers so that my hand is like the shadow of his.

  ‘I wish it could be just the two of us,’ I say.

  ‘It can be,’ Adam says. ‘It is.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  He shakes his head, gathers my hair in his hands.

  ‘Do you think two people are ever more than the sum of their parts?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’ He stares into my eyes. ‘What’s the matter with you? Yes, of course they are.’

  I lace my hand into his and lie with my head on his chest, hearing the throb of his heart from far inside. He strokes my hair and the back of my neck. The candles burn straight in the stillness of the room. I watch that stack of books and papers on his desk.

  The next day I go to Moulding Mansions. Tyger has cleared up the kitchen in honour of my return, and has cooked spaghetti bolognaise – very sophisticated compared to her normal beans on toast. Dougie isn’t around and Sam is too hungover to get out of bed. I’m ready to be annoyed by Tyger and her questions about Adam but then I find I want to talk.

  ‘The problem is,’ I say, ‘that I have a suspicion that the reason why Adam and I get on so well is precisely because – although I do really like him – yet somehow I don’t care so very much. It’s weird. Other men I’ve been really nice to, and it’s got me absolutely nowhere.’

  Tyger sloshes tomato ketchup over her spaghetti bolognaise.

  ‘Indifference attracts,’ she says. ‘That’s the thing …’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Dunno. Most of us get less lovable when we fall in love. That’s the gloomy truth, I suppose.’

  I suck up spaghetti and get it all over my chin.

  ‘The thing about Adam is that he’s so simplistic and literal,’ I say. ‘And it’s intentional. Which is amazing in a journalist, amazing in anyone really, and admirable. Often I listen to the things he says and I think – oh come on. Yet that straightforward quality in him does draw like a magnet.’

  We move on to ice cream, eating straight from the pot.

  ‘The thing is that – it’s like – this is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. A proper relationship … grown-up … And Adam seems so right …’

  ‘Yeah, but oddly those ones often don’t work out.’

  I pick up Biggles who is scratching around on the kitchen floor.

  ‘So is Sam just hungover?’ I ask.

  ‘Nah,’ Tyger says. ‘He’s a bit crap, to be honest. It seems like he’s now somewhere below soft furnishings in the list of Debbie’s priorities …’

  We can neither of us help laughing, although we’re sorry for Sam.

  I go upstairs and take him some tea.

  A hand and face appear from under the side of the duvet.

  ‘We miss you,’ he says.

  ‘Oh yeah, course you do.’

  But when Adam comes to pick me up I don’t want to go. He takes me straight from Moulding Mansions to the station because I’m going home to see Nanda. In the car Adam and I talk about families. He comes from a nice, normal home so he doesn’t really understand.

  ‘It’s like one day I saw this great big car park,’ I say. ‘And in this car park there was only one car but it was parked in the worst possible place – crooked and cramped, halfway on a muddy verge, miles from the entrance. So I thought – why ever did that person park their car there? Then it occurred to me that, at the time when the person parked their car, the car park must have been totally full. And that’s how it is in families. You don’t get to park where you want because by the time you arrive most of the spaces are already occupied.’

  Adam nods but I’m not sure he understands. We are in a traffic jam and through the open window there’s a smell of curry and petrol fumes. Sun presses down on us through the windscreen. Adam’s arm, with his sleeve rolled up, rests on the ledge of the open window, his middle finger tapping up and down.

  ‘How much do you love me?’ he asks. It is a serious question.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I feel a little suspicious of the whole thing. It has been come by too cheaply. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be difficult.’

  ‘No. But it’s just – I mean – I can’t really imagine now what it would be like without you. So I wouldn’t really know how much I love you – unless you got run over by a bus.’

  He laughs at that and then suddenly the traffic moves ahead. One more mile and then he parks the car, insistent that he must come with me to see that the train exists. I buy a ticket and he comes with me onto the platform.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Sorry. That was a bit much, wasn’t it? About the bus.’

  ‘No, I like the fact that you’re so honest. That’s what I like about you.’ Around us people are pushing to get on to the train. Voices echo under the high glass roof. Adam is holding my bag and steering me towards one of the train doors.

  I catch hold of his arm. ‘Adam, I’m not honest. I want to be honest but I’m not. Please don’t think I’m honest.’

  ‘Yes, OK. But get on the train or you won’t get a seat.’

  ‘No, I want you to promise me. I want you to promise you won’t think that.’

  ‘All right. I promise. If it will make you happy.’

  He kisses me goodbye and I watch him growing small as the train leaves.

  Home. Above me is the black line of Frampton Edge, hemmed by the clouds, and below it Thwaite Cottages lie long and low, their moss-crusted roofs dipping to the ground. I feel drunk on the air and the space. The wind drags at my hair. In the garden plants crawl flat along the ground and the apple trees are twisted to one side. Nothing grows straight up here because of the wind. When I was a child there was a raging storm and a walker was blown off the Edge. He whirled like a spinning top across our garden, and Freddy had to go out on her hands and knees to get him inside.

  Nanda is at her front door – a Struwwelpeter figure, brisk and spiky, with pale green eyes, the colour of willow, and a fuzzy shock of grey hair. Then Freddy and Theodora appear and they’re all talking at once, aware of themselves as a comedy, enjoying their own performance. Freddy is gripping Theodora by the arm, trying to stop her moving down the slippery path, and they pull at each other, back and forth, as they fight their way towards me. Freddy is wearing her best cardigan but inside out, to keep it clean. Wind, of course, is
said to be one of the causes of madness.

  ‘So how are you?’ I say to Theodora.

  ‘Unvanquished, more or less,’ she says. As she kisses me her long pearl earrings dance against my cheek.

  A vast hole has been dug in the garden for the wind turbine. They wrote to me in Brussels to tell me about that. And I thought – look, call me old-fashioned, call me unimaginative, but shouldn’t you get the porch fixed first? Because it’s had a prop under it for ten years. But they don’t even realise that, because they’ve lost all sense of time. Like they still talk about the twenty-first birthday present they’re going to buy me, and I don’t like to say – actually I’m twenty-eight now.

  ‘When the turbine is finished,’ Freddy says, ‘it will be able to provide all the power that we need. So then we will be quite independent. No one will be able to disturb us.’ I nod enthusiastically while staring at the miles of emptiness around us.

  Their lives here are like a badly organised camping holiday. Freddy’s cottage is the worst. The roof has been covered by tarpaulin now for ten years and half the windows are broken and covered with cardboard. No one except Freddy has been in there for as long as I can remember. You anyway can’t get in the door because she’s never thrown anything away for fifty years. The place is stacked from wall to wall with boxes of total rubbish, all neatly labelled. Theodora says that Freddy’s even got a box marked ‘pieces of string too short to do anything with’. And that, says Theodora, constitutes a mental illness. Freddy denies there is any such box.

  Inside Nanda’s cottage there’s a layer more dust on everything and a rancid smell of dog, despite the demise of Bullseye. I step over a sewing machine and collapsed shoe boxes full of letters then sit down by the fire on the orange sofa that goes round three sides of a square, and has legs like upside down radio aerials, and is so low that old biddies from Burrington get stuck in it, and you can see their knickers. Much of it was eaten by Bullseye and his predecessors, but Nanda won’t get rid of it because it was designed by a friend who was a famous furniture designer in the seventies. Black-rimmed holes are burnt into the carpet where logs have fallen from the grate. In one corner the floorboards have given way and the hole is stuffed with newspapers.