Double Vision (4 page)

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine. I just went a bit dizzy.’

‘Oh, you were looking at the Green Men?’

‘They’re supposed to be symbols of rebirth, but actually if you look at them they’re quite horrible.’

‘I think it’s part of the cult of the head. Did you know the Celts used to cut off the heads of their enemies and stuff the mouths with green leaves?’

‘No, I didn’t. Not particularly optimistic, then?’

‘Not if it was your head.’

She smiled. ‘I really only popped in to thank you for sending Peter Wingrave round.’

‘Oh, he came to see you?’

‘Yes, last night.’

‘And you took him on?’

‘My dear, I jumped at him. He’s there now, putting up scaffolding.’

‘That’s good. You’re looking a lot better, Kate.’

‘I feel better.’ They sat in the pew behind the hymn and prayer book stand. ‘Have you known him long?’

‘Quite a while. Seven years, something like that. But not continuously. He’s travelled around quite a bit.’ He seemed to be debating whether to say more. ‘He’s an interesting person. I think you’ll like him.’

‘Why gardening, though? I mean, he’s got a degree.’

‘Plenty of graduate gardeners, Kate.’

That wasn’t fair. She wasn’t being snobbish about gardeners, she was saying, Yes, but something’s not right, something doesn’t fit, and she felt Alec had understood that perfectly well and decided not to acknowledge it.

‘We were very happy with him,’ he said. ‘The parish
council. If we can’t get any more sheep, we’d certainly use him again.’

‘That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. Second choice after the sheep?’

‘We don’t have to pay the sheep.’

‘Do you think you will get some more?’

Alec shook his head. ‘I just don’t know. You notice the farmers aren’t restocking?’

Kate remembered men in white decontamination suits chasing squealing sheep around the graveyard. They’d been sent to the pyre at Ravenscroft Farm. Kate had stood with Angela, whose precious boys had been destroyed in the same cull, on a hill not far away from the farm and watched the fire burn. Clouds of foul-smelling black smoke had obscured the setting sun. The pitiful legs of cows and sheep stuck up from the mound of corpses and rubber tyres. A stench of rotting flesh drifted towards them over the valley, scraps of burnt hair and skin whirled into the air. Kate put her arm around Angela’s shoulders and was trying to persuade her to leave, when a flake of singed cowhide landed on her lower lip, and she spat and clawed at her mouth to get the taste away.

Alec was staring at her. She realized she must have been silent for too long. ‘I was thinking about Angela’s boys.’

‘Oh, yes. Thomas, William, Rufus…’

‘And Harry.’

‘And Harry. I knew there was another.’

‘I wish she’d get herself some more.’

Alec raised his eyebrows. ‘You think she needs sheep?’

‘You can’t buy people.’

‘You don’t need to buy people.’

They were getting into one of those conversations that threatened to become pastoral, and as always Kate avoided going any further. ‘I’d better be going. Angela’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

The door creaked open, letting a shaft of sunlight fall across the stone floor, and Angela appeared. She blushed when she saw Alec, though she saw him at every service – Holy Communion, Matins, Evensong, she was never away. The three of them chatted for a while, then Kate thanked him again and watched him walk down the aisle, genuflect in front of the altar – a bit more of an effort these days, she noticed, he held on to a choir stall to lever himself up again – and stride off into the vestry.

Angela went ahead to get the car. She’d parked outside the chemist’s, she said, and that was too far for Kate to walk. Kate followed more slowly, testing the rubber tip of her stick on patches of ice. Alec hadn’t been particularly informative about Peter, but in a way she didn’t mind that. The closer Peter came to being simply a pair of hands, the better she’d be pleased.

At the gate she turned and looked across to Ben’s grave. The air was iron cold and still. She would never, never, never be able to accept his death, and she didn’t try. This wasn’t an illness she would recover from; it was an amputation she had to learn to live with. There was a great and surprising peace in acknowledging this.

She took a deep breath, wondering if she could possibly walk as far as the grave, but then Angela called her name, and she limped across the cattle grid and down the grass verge to the car.

Four

On Stephen Sharkey’s last night in London he went to the leaving party he hadn’t wanted to have, and ended up getting thoroughly drunk.

He woke at five the next morning with a mouth like a dustbin, and had to ferret around with his tongue to work up some spit before he felt human enough to stagger into the bathroom. One look in the mirror said it all. Lids crusted, eyelashes matted, the whites of his eyes criss-crossed with red veins, a Martian landscape. Contact lenses left in. After several painful attempts he managed to get them out.

He forced himself through washing and shaving, made coffee, ate two slices of dry toast for breakfast, then started to pack. He had a busy morning ahead of him, seeing his solicitor, then his publisher, and he couldn’t possibly do either looking like this.

On his way to the first appointment he stopped at a chemist’s, bought eyedrops and selected one of the few pairs of sunglasses they had in the shop. He looked, he thought, peering at himself in the mirror above the display stand, like a soon-to-be divorced, almost middleaged man, sweaty, frightened, uncool and desperate to prove he could still pull. Which, he informed his reflection waspishly, is exactly what you are.

By two o’clock he was on the train to Newcastle. He slept intermittently, woke, watched the backs of other people’s houses rush past, then travelled two hours through a rain-sodden landscape. Ploughed fields with flooded furrows like striations of sky. Once they stopped in the middle of nowhere, and a herd of cows came trudging over to the fence and stared at the train, chewing, in a mist of their own breath.

At the station he lugged his cases on to the platform and stood with them, one on either side, like inverted commas, he thought, drawing attention to the possible invalidity of the statement they enclose. Invalid, or invalid, whichever way you cared to pronounce it, that was how he felt. A man who’d sacrificed his marriage to his career, and, now that the marriage was over, had turned his back on the career as well. Stop beating yourself up, he told himself, shifting from foot to foot, but it was hard not to. He felt anxious, but that was partly the drink. If this cottage turned out to be too claustrophobic – too close to Robert, in other words – he could easily find somewhere else to live. And he wasn’t going to starve. He had a network of contacts. If the book took longer than three months to write, he could keep himself going on freelance work.

No sign of Robert. Just as Stephen was thinking he’d have to find a phone – he’d forgotten to charge his mobile just as he’d forgotten to take his contact lenses out – he caught sight of him, threading his way across the crowded concourse with that hospital doctor’s disguised run of his.

Striding towards Stephen, Robert opened his arms. They embraced, awkwardly, their preconceptions of each other failing to accommodate the reality of muscle and bone.

Robert held him at arm’s length, wincing and throwing his head back – a comment on the sunglasses.

Stephen took them off and ogled him.

‘Oh, my God, you look like a terrorist.’ He picked up one of the cases. ‘I’m parked just outside.’

Stephen followed him out of the station, head down into an icy wind that snatched the breath from his mouth. His trousers, too thin for the weather, flattened against his shins.

‘What you going to do for a car while you’re here?’ Robert asked, as he unlocked his own.

‘Buy one.’

‘Nerys got yours?’

‘Yup. To be fair she used it more than I did.’

Robert settled himself into the driving seat, hauling the belt across his chest. ‘How are you?’

‘Tired.’

‘Hung over.’

‘
And
tired.’

Robert turned the heater on, and within a few seconds Stephen felt himself start to grow drowsy. Blinking hard, he opened the window and gulped the moist air.

‘So that’s it, then?’ Robert said.

‘Yeah, that’s it. Last assignment.’

‘And you actually mean it this time?’

‘I’ve handed in my resignation.’

‘Because last time –’

‘It’s the same as any other business, Robert. You get typecast. When I got back from Afghanistan, I said, Right, that’s it, finished. I don’t want to do it any more. And everybody said, Right, fine. No problem. And the next thing I knew I was being measured for another flak jacket.’

Robert was smiling. ‘You could’ve refused.’

‘Yeah, if I didn’t mind not working.’

‘And where’s the flak jacket now?’

‘I don’t know. On a peg somewhere.’

‘Waiting to be worn.’

‘
No
.’ Stephen’s face felt numb as if he’d just come out of the dentist’s. He rubbed his cheeks and shivered inside the too-thin jacket. ‘How’s the family?’

‘Fine. Beth’s a lot happier now she’s got somebody reliable to look after Adam.’ He braked, drove slowly through a huge puddle, water curling up on either side of the car. ‘God help us if this lot freezes.’

Looking out over the sodden fields, Stephen was aware of winter in a way that he almost never was in London. There was a rhythmic squeal as the windscreen wipers swept to and fro, creating triangles on the mudspattered glass. Robert pulled out to overtake, and for a second the windscreen was blind, marbled with flung spray. Stephen made himself keep quiet, remembering how competitive they’d been as boys, how furious Robert had been when Stephen passed his driving test first time. Robert had managed it only at the second attempt.

‘So you’re definitely out of it?’

Why did everybody find it so hard to believe? ‘Yeah.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Fine. It’s the right time.’ Actually, he thought, not fine. More like an unshelled nut lying on the ground, any hope of future germination a lot less convincing than the prospect of being snuffled up by a passing pig. ‘Anyway, that’s enough about me and my problems. How are you?’

‘Fine.’

He hoped Robert’s ‘fines’ were a bit more honest than his, otherwise the whole bloody family was up the creek. But Robert was all right, of course he was. You only had to look at him – happiness and success oozing from every pore.

‘I’ve just applied for a research grant of three million pounds.’

‘What for?’

‘Possible treatments for Parkinson’s and dementia.’

When Stephen didn’t immediately reply, he added, with a slight edge, ‘I’m afraid my line of work’s a bit less glamorous than yours.’

Stephen was wondering if Robert had as many doubts about the coming weeks of proximity as he had himself. They’d never been close, even as boys, and since their mother’s death had met only at weddings and funerals. And yet, when he had rung Robert and told him his marriage was over and he needed somewhere to live, Robert offered the cottage, immediately, without hesitation.
Shared genes, Robert would have said. The biological basis for altruism.

They were driving by the side of a lake, its water pockmarked by falling rain. A moorhen picked its way across the boggy ground and disappeared into the shadow of some willows whose bare branches overhung the water. Beyond the lake an immense dark stain of forest spread over the hillside. As they came closer, he could see that it was already dark beneath the trees, and would have been darkish even at noon. No life on the forest floor, or none that he could discern, though a sign warned of deer crossing. At intervals along the road there were small, crushed bundles of flesh and fur: rabbits, mainly, but here and there the gleaming iridescent plumage of a pheasant.

‘Carnage,’ Robert said. ‘The speed people drive through here. They’ve only got to hit a deer and it’d be the end of them.’

Robert’s house lay between the village and the forest. As they came out of the shadow of the trees, Stephen saw a grey stone farmhouse, appearing and disappearing with each bend in the road, fitting in so seamlessly with the surrounding fields that it scarcely seemed to have been made with human hands, but rather to have been thrown up by some natural process, like the granite boulders that littered the valley floor, left behind by a retreating glacier of the last Ice Age. Certainly it was less obviously a human artefact than the forest that crept over the hills towards it.

Robert turned up the drive and stopped in front of the house. Stephen got out, feeling surprisingly stiff, and stood awkwardly as his ten-year-old nephew, Adam, hurled himself over the threshold to hug his father. He didn’t seem to know when to stop, but simply crashed headlong into Robert’s chest. ‘Dad, Dad, I’ve found a badger.’

‘A dead one? Where?’

‘On the forest road.’

‘And you pulled him all the way back?’

‘I put him on a bin liner and dragged him.’ He was tugging at Robert’s sleeve to make him come and look.

‘Hey, hey. Say hello to Uncle Stephen.’

‘Hello,’ Adam said, but he was too shy to make eye contact and seemed to be hoping that if he didn’t look at Stephen he might disappear. ‘
Dad
.’

Robert let himself be tugged around the corner of the house and, not knowing what else to do, Stephen followed. A path led by the vegetable patch, where last year’s yellowing cabbage stalks stuck out of the muddy ground, white and flabby and marked at intervals with leaf scars like ringworm. A whiff of decay, which Stephen held his breath to avoid encountering, and then they were out on to a long sloping lawn that led down to a stand of trees – conifers of some kind, an advance guard of the invading forest.

The badger was sprawled on his back, legs splayed, a trickle of black blood running down from one side of his mouth. His fangs were bared, snarling at the car he’d seen too late. Bending over him, Stephen had the
feeling that if you looked long enough into those golden eyes you’d see headlights on a road at night, just as earlier generations believed that a murderer’s image was preserved on the victim’s retina.