Learning by Heart (29 page)

He stepped into the shadow of the column, took her hand and drew her alongside him.

‘Do you believe in the dark?’ she whispered. ‘Can we be sent to the dark for ever?’

‘No,’ he said softly, gently. ‘There will be no dark for us. No dark at all.’

That night, they met Richard and Alex at six o’clock, as had been arranged. The café opposite the cathedral was rearranging its tables, and there was already a queue. All down the streets, the flags of shops, posters, fluttered in the orange slanted glare from the harbour as the sun began to set.

Both men looked tired.

‘What did you do?’ Cora asked Richard. ‘Where did you go?’

‘To Noto,’ he said, as if stating the obvious. Then he relented, and gave her an apologetic smile. A contortion of a smile. ‘Have you had a good day?’ he asked, in a perfunctory fashion.

‘And you saw anyone?’ she persisted. ‘What did you see?’

He looked irritated. She only wanted him to tell her. She wanted him to draw her aside, take her away, stop the fall before it began. But he would only glance at her. She felt like grasping him and screaming for him to speak.

‘What is it?’ she whispered, as the four of them began to walk across the square. She squeezed his hand. ‘Won’t you tell me everything? Who did you see? Richard …’

Alex turned. ‘There’s a restaurant up the coast,’ he said. ‘It’s not far and it’s quieter. It’s on our way.’

They agreed to his suggestion, went to the cars and drove out of Syracusa. They got to the place at seven.

True evening had settled by now, and they sat at tables on a small terrace above a rocky shore, ready to watch the dusk roll across the sea.

They were silent while the olives were placed on the table. They chose their food from the menus, still not speaking. Then, before they ate, Pietro asked if they would mind if he swam. The day had been hot, he said. He often swam in the evening.

The men nodded him away with smiles.

He went back through the restaurant, not glancing at her or meeting her eye. A minute or two later, Cora saw him go down the lane at the side of the restaurant, on to the stony beach and round an outcrop further down.

Alex had poured the wine. At last, the silence was broken, and he and Richard began to talk about the end of the week, the Easter celebrations in Enna.

Cora saw Pietro walk out into the water, watching carefully where he placed his feet before he struck out from the shoreline. The light was fading, and he moved through the grey-green water, the ripples catching the last of the red in the sky. The reflection fanned out from him as he moved through the sea, copper on grey, copper on green, breaking and changing. She followed his progress, the line of his shoulders, the lithe movement of his body as he turned on his back; and saw him look, just once, towards her.

‘What it is to be young,’ Richard commented, noticing where she was gazing.

‘And foolish,’ Alex said. And laughed to himself.

Seventeen

Nick was late as he drove down to the coast. He kept looking at his watch. He had promised Zeph he would be there in good time, but there had been an accident on the motorway and he had been stuck for hours on some godforsaken stretch north of Winchester. By the time he reached the white chalk gash of Twyford Down, he saw why: a sprawl of vehicles across two lanes of the road.

He was supposed to have been at Abbotsbury by two o’clock that afternoon. He had set out early, a kind of miracle for him, with his habitual tardiness, but he had been up since first light, pacing the floor, unable to eat, worrying what she wanted to say to him. Wondering if this would be their last meeting. Frantic that it would be the start of some dark new chapter, whose horrors and farces even he could not have dreamed up.

By the time he had got into the car, he had calmed himself a little. Zeph had called him late yesterday afternoon. She had suggested that they meet each other on neutral ground, somewhere away from Cora and without Joshua. He had leaped at the chance to see her, but had not understood her voice – the strange tone of offhand objectivity, almost as if she were lighthearted or that what she was saying didn’t matter. He had tried to unravel it ever since he had put down the phone last night.

It was almost as if she were telling a joke, as if she were reaching a punchline, but it stopped short of humour and dropped away into irrationality. It occurred to him that she had been shocked by something. She sounded like someone who had seen a crisis shear past them and knock down another. He heard unreality in her voice. It worried him.

As he had driven out of London, he had thought that perhaps her mother had persuaded her to do something drastic. Move completely away from him, break off all contact. Leave the country, even. When he had first met her – those centuries ago, before the world turned upside-down and inside-out – she had talked of travelling, going to places like Thailand and Cambodia, India. She had had those dreams then. Within weeks of meeting him, she had stopped mentioning them. She had put them away to be with him, he knew. He had never appreciated it. And he swore to himself, getting through the insanity of the London suburbs, that if she gave him the ghost of a chance, he would rewind all the time they had had together. He would let her go wherever she wanted, even if she wanted to be without him. He would help her finance it. He would look after Joshua, or he would allow her to take Joshua with her, even if it meant they would be parted for a while. He would encourage her to do whatever it took to make her happy. On one condition: that eventually she would consider coming back to him.

He would give her back her dreams.

And then, thinking about it more calmly, he knew that Cora would never encourage her daughter just to go. Perhaps it was Cora’s influence even now that had enabled their meeting today.

Then he nearly drove into the back of a car with a trailer – his concentration had crumbled. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Get a grip.’

After Winchester, after Twyford, he pulled off the road at the first opportunity to dial Zeph’s number. He got only the answerphone.

‘Can you please wait?’ he had asked the dead air at the other end of the line. ‘Please. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

Off the motorway, he had put his foot down and driven at a suicidal pace. The New Forest rushed past the windows, the blue-smoke blur of the heathland. An hour later he was running parallel to the little villages of Hardy country, the roofs of Burleston and Briantspuddle buried in green hills beyond the fast road that ran along the higher ground. Finally, he came down to the coast, places that belonged to his and Zeph’s past, places where they had been when they had first visited Cora, the orchards and farm. Places that had always mesmerized him: a secret country of valleys running down to the sea.

As he drew into the car park by the beach, he looked anxiously along the line of cars for Zeph. Then he spotted the red Fiat, and the familiar numberplate.

‘Oh, thank you, Jesus,’ he breathed. He felt sick. Nerves overwhelmed him. He took one, two deep breaths, unconsciously wringing his hands, then flexing his fists. ‘Don’t talk to her like this,’ he told himself, in a savage whisper. ‘Talk to her like you’ve got a grain of fucking sense.’

He got out of the car.

She was nowhere to be seen. He walked to one end of the parking spaces, then back again, and crossed the little footbridge over the stream behind the shelving bank of pebbles. The track led up over a dune to the crest of the rise. There, about fifty or so yards to the left, Zeph sat on the pebbly shore, with her back to the road, looking at the sea, her arms wrapped round her knees.

He stepped off the boardwalk that led down to the sea, and stumbled across the shifting pebbles. She looked up only when he stood next to her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Did you get my message? There was an accident on the M3. I’ve driven like a lunatic, Zeph, I promise.’

She gave him the ghost of a smile. ‘You always drive like a lunatic,’ she said.

He sat down next to her. It was a bright, breezy day; the sea was coming in fast, driven by the offshore current that pulled it westwards, at a slant parallel to the land. Just a few feet from the shoreline, the depth shelved away sharply.

‘I’ve been thinking about when I first brought you down here,’ she said, ‘that weekend.’

He tried hard to remember. He had known her for about six months, he thought. She had seemed nervous about him meeting Cora. She had spoken ambivalently of her mother, in tones that were occasionally affectionate and occasionally wary.

‘Do you get on, the two of you?’ he had asked her.

‘I’m never quite sure of her,’ she had replied. ‘I was Daddy’s girl.’

‘Is she frightening?’ he had asked. ‘Should I wear a shin guard?’

She had laughed. ‘Nothing like that,’ she had said.

And he had found Cora charming. A little reserved, maybe, but he understood why any mother would be reserved around him and their daughter. He wasn’t the best catch in the world – great for a night, but with a limited shelf life. He had always thought of himself as untrustworthy, the walking-out kind. Until he met Zeph. Then all he had done was try to get as close to her as he could.

Suddenly he realized, with Zeph at his side and the memories of early weekends in his head, that he had proved himself right.

He
was
the untrustworthy kind. One of Joshua’s space soldiers sprung to life, a cartoon character. That’s all he was, a drawing. An anti-hero. The wicked one coloured black. Not a proper person.

‘I was thinking about swimming,’ Zeph murmured.

He jolted back to the present. ‘Today?’ he asked, dismayed.

‘Not today, you idiot,’ she retorted. ‘That weekend.’

‘Which one?’

‘You don’t remember?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She put a hand to her face, then rested her elbow on her knee and kept her eyes shaded.

He watched a little boy, who was playing further down the narrow fringe of sand between the pebbles and the sea. His mother sat a few yards away.

‘How’s Josh?’ he asked.

‘A lot better.’

‘No temperature?’

‘No.’ She lifted some pebbles with her free hand, then let them drain, one by one, from the palm. ‘What have you been doing?’ she asked.

‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Except seeing Andy.’

‘How is he?’

‘He got me a film deal for
The Measure
.’

Her hand dropped from her eyes and she stared at him. ‘You’re joking?’

‘No,’ he said. For real.’

‘What kind of deal?’

‘It’s good,’ he told her. ‘Very good.’

Her eyes ranged over his face. This was what they had talked about ever since they had met, this chance. He saw exactly where he was standing; had seen it clearly over the last few days. He was standing on a piece of ground that, if he shifted his balance one iota, would turn him away from her. A thin peninsular. Or a raft mid-stream, rotating with the current. He had only to make that move, press his weight an inch one way or the other …

‘Oh, my God,’ she murmured. ‘Well …’

‘You should have seen Andy with this guy,’ he told her. ‘I mean, this man comes in in golf pants, you know, like checked knickerbockers. He’s got a three-foot-long cigar clamped in his teeth, the regular movie mogul, and he looks like a Technicolor version of Mack Sennet …’

‘He did
not
wear knickerbockers,’ Zeph said.

‘He had the 1920s megaphone, he had a whip, he had a cravat …’

‘Oh, right.’ She laughed, in an unguarded moment.

‘And he has this line-up of bathing beauties, and right in the middle of this restaurant they’re singing ‘We’re In The Money’, and this huge fountain comes up, and suddenly Andy’s doing synchronized leg splits in a bikini …’

She smiled. ‘I missed a hell of a show, then.’

‘You missed the best,’ he said. ‘Andy was on his knees, licking this guy’s shoes and worse. It was not a pretty sight.’

‘I wish I’d seen it.’

‘
I
wish you’d seen it,’ he said. ‘I wish you’d been there.’ And he wished, too, that she would laugh again. He had always been able to make her laugh.

Instead she looked away.

Below them, the little boy was throwing stones into the sea.

‘This guy wants me to go to the States,’ Nick said.

She didn’t respond.

He didn’t know what he had expected her to say – to be glad for him, perhaps. Yes, she would be that, even if she disguised it now. She would be pleased. She knew what it had cost to come as far as this, she above all people. After all, she had paid the price.

He remembered her coming in late at night from a job, one of the first she’d had, in a bar that had stayed open until two in the morning. He hated her doing that work; it was a bar in a club, and he had gone once, and seen how hard she worked, and what sort of crap she was expected to accept, with cheerful grace, from the customers, who were smug city suits to a man, and who thought it was all right to shout her name like they were calling a dog to heel. She would walk along the bar – people all down it shouting fucking orders at her, and the music was deafening – and she would smile at someone, and ask what he wanted and, more times than not, he would try to reach across the bar and grab her. The club had had the brilliant idea of making the girls all wear a T-shirt with their names above one breast, and the joke was obvious and constant. ‘What’s the other one called?’ they would yell. And the inevitable: ‘What’s Zeph? What’s it short for?’ And those who tried to guess. ‘Hey, Stephanie!’

She’d done her time, all right. And more.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘You must do what you need to.’

He leaned forward in an effort to see the expression on her face. He caught a look of extreme sadness. That was what she had been hiding behind her hand: her desolation.

He put his hand on her arm, and she got to her feet. She started to walk away, and he followed, slipping and sliding as he tried to keep up with her. She got down to the strip of wet sand. They passed the little boy, and went on along the beach. Not many people came down here: it was not family-friendly, with the enormous bank of stones and the terrible current in the water. Yet it was beautiful, startling: the yellow and the blue, more dazzling than any other coastline in the area.