Lighthouse (13 page)

He has passed the midpoint of his circular walk, has walked more miles than he has left to go. He will be back at his starting point, back in Hellhaus, by the end of the week, and every step now takes him closer.

He abandons the rest of the day’s hiking. Finding his way to the station, he catches a train to his next overnight stop, resting his miserable feet and leaning his head on the rattling window against which the rain has begun to fall.

‘There were still shipwrecks,’ his father said, ‘after the lighthouse was built.’

Futh’s mother was sunbathing in a bikini top and shorts. She had taken off her walking boots and socks and stretched out her bare feet, but Futh still had his on. His father was wearing ordinary shoes and ruining them.

His mother liked to walk and Futh liked to go with her. There were hills where they lived, where the houses ended. You left the shop on the corner with your quarter pound of sweets in a paper bag and walked across a field and there you were, going up into the hills. The hills skirted the town. It was possible to walk for miles along the top without losing sight of their house, although his mother always kept walking until she did, humming tunes which were lost to the wind. His father never came, and his mother no longer asked him.

Up on the cliffs in Cornwall, his father was talking about wrecking and plundering, and telling some story about a ghost ship crashing over and over again into the rocks around the lighthouse, and Futh saw his mother rolling her eyes. He had seen this before, his mother fidgeting while his father held forth. This was how it always began, with his father going on in this manner and his mother rolling her eyes and twitching and sighing like some creature stirring. If, after some time, his father was still talking, his mother would begin with her provocative interjections. ‘Nobody’s listening,’ she would say, or, ‘Nobody cares.’ And then perhaps there would be silence, or perhaps his father’s temper would flare – he lost his temper easily but it was all over just as quickly.

She gave a great sigh. His father was oblivious. ‘The light,’ he said, ‘flashes every three seconds and can be seen from thirty miles away. In fog, the foghorn is used.’

Futh wandered off, as if there might be somewhere to escape to. He had in his hand the perfume, the silver lighthouse, which he had taken out of his mother’s handbag. Returning after a short while with the glass vial out of its silver case, he found his father still talking about foghorns, or perhaps he had been waiting and was just picking up where he had left off, and his mother said without opening her eyes, ‘Do you know how much you bore me?’

Futh watched his father silently placing the remains of the picnic in the cool box, packing the plastic plates and beakers into the rucksack, putting the lid on the Thermos of cold coffee and shaking off the picnic blanket on which only he had been sitting, a breeze getting up as he tried to fold it. Finally, with everything packed away, his father stood still. He looked at his wife lying in the grass with the sun on her, and Futh watched the gulls. He watched them until his mother, standing, said, ‘I’m going home,’ and then, looking down, he saw his hand and the blood where he was cut, the little bottle broken, his mother’s perfume in his wound.

The same afternoon, they collected their luggage from the caravan site and took the train back from Cornwall. His mother changed in the toilets, swapping her sun clothes for travelling clothes and putting on shoes with heels, slipping them off again as soon as she sat down.

When the train was moving, his father went to the buffet car and did not return until they were almost home. His mother fell asleep with her bare feet on the grubby floor, her short, pale-blond hair resting against the dirty window. The perfume case, containing the broken glass vial, was in Futh’s pocket. She might have known he had it, but did not ask for it back. His unwashed hands and his boots smelt strongly of violets. His mother smelt of the leftover orange she had eaten in the carriage before falling asleep. Years later, when Futh worked in the manufacturing of artificial odours, the smell of octyl acetate would make him feel sad.

He knew, sitting there on the rushing train, that his mother was leaving them. He knew that when the train reached their station, the holiday would be over and then she would go. He wanted the train to slow down; he wanted it never to stop. He wanted his mother to keep on sleeping, his father to stay in the bar. But the train sped on and the daylight went and through the windows, in the dark, Futh glimpsed the names of the stations they were hurrying through and he knew that they were almost home. His father returned from the bar, and the noise he made coming into the carriage looking for his seat woke Futh’s mother, and the train slowed, and trundled to a stop.

Futh can’t for the life of him remember his mother’s favourite song, how it goes, and as he walks from the train station to that night’s hotel he keeps humming at it, trying to pin it down. In the end, he almost has it.

Arriving at the hotel in wet boots, he finds that it has an indoor porch where other walkers have left their muddy footwear. He does the same, stowing his in a spare corner for the night.

Getting his key, he goes to his room and straight into the bathroom to run a hot bath. While he waits for the tub to fill he looks around the bedroom. He approves of the décor. The curtains and the bedding are made of the same material, with a nature theme which is echoed in the watercolour over the bed and the embroidered cover of the cushion on the armchair. The colours are picked out in the paint on the walls and the woodwork. He appreciates such womanly touches. He would like something like this in his flat.

He is satisfied by the sight of a fire escape immediately outside the window.

He undresses, packing his clothes straight into his suitcase, trying to keep the clean things separate from the dirty things. He thinks about doing some stretches like he used to have to do at school before running. He tries to touch his toes but can’t quite reach them and even then it hurts the backs of his legs. At first this makes him feel old, but then he recalls not being able to do it at school either. He was never any good at running anyway. He sits down on the edge of the bed and does some ankle exercises but they are excruciating.

He goes into his suitcase and takes out his alarm clock, sets it for the morning and puts it by the bed. On his way back to the bathroom, he stops by the window to look at the view beyond the fire escape – the night sky, the dark hillside, the moonlit river. He thinks of opening the window to let the night air in and discovers that the window frame is painted shut.

He steps gingerly into the tub, his raw heels stinging. As he lowers himself in, slowly reclining his weary torso, the deep water rises up. It washes against his jaw and his cheeks like waves against the hull of a boat and closes over his head.

CHAPTER TEN

Memorabilia

Ester strides along the pavement, the heels of her new stilettos beating like tiny war drums against the concrete slabs.

She began her afternoon at the hairdresser’s, where she had her hair cut short again and bleached the platinum blond she had worn in her early twenties. The girl tried to persuade her to have a warmer shade, but Ester was adamant.

Afterwards, browsing the clothes shops, Ester found herself looking at a window display, at a mannequin wearing a strapless dress with a corset bodice and a knee-length skirt, satin in her favourite shade of pink, like the Blushing Pink she had chosen for the bedroom walls. She stood there on the pavement for a while, looking in through the window at the dress and at the mannequin whose hard, expressionless face was turned away from her.

It was some time since she had been shopping for clothes. She took the dress to the changing room, pragmatically choosing one a size larger than she had been the last time she wore anything like this, before buying the dress one size larger than that. She also bought some shoes, the same shade with a stiletto heel.

She stopped at a café for a sandwich and a beer. She went into the toilets to change into her new outfit, noticing that her dress matched the toilet paper. Leaving her old clothes and shoes behind, she set off home.

Marching through Hellhaus in ten-centimetre heels, she knows she does not look like the girl she once was. The hairdresser was right. The severe cut and cold blond now make her look tired. She is broader and heavier than she was and her calves are fleshy beneath the hem of her new dress. But she walks with the same swing in her arms, the same sway in her hips, and her flesh and bones remember something of herself at twenty-one.

She was aware of Bernard before she met him. He was always a topic of conversation at Ida’s house. When Ester was not at Ida’s, she was often with Conrad and his friends, who also knew Bernard. Someone would ask about him, or someone would have news or gossip about him, about what he was doing, who he was with, when he was coming home. Bernard was only a little older than his brother, but Ester sometimes thought that he made Conrad – who still lived at home with his mother and still knocked about with his schoolmates – seem like a child.

She met a few of Bernard’s ex-girlfriends, all of whom were thin and blond and well-dressed. She heard stories about him punching boys for talking too long to his girlfriends, and one about him pushing a stranger down a flight of stairs for just looking. ‘He hit me with a bottle,’ one boy told her, showing off a faint scar above his eyebrow, ‘for dancing with his girl.’

After she and Bernard became a couple, he was jealous around her too. He did not like other men looking at her, although he never hit them, and Ester wondered why not, why he had cared more about his previous girlfriends.

On their first date, they saw a film, and Ester kept the cinema ticket, at first just in her purse and later in an envelope with everything else – a few postcards, a beer mat on which he had written his telephone number, a dried flower from a walk they had taken, and a dead leaf she had found in her hair afterwards.

She still has these things. She keeps them in the drawer of her bedside table and looks through them sometimes, putting the dry flower to her nose. She handles the envelope’s contents reverently as if these were the memorabilia of a dead pop star rather than the man she married, the man she still lives with.

Bernard, she thinks, would not recall now which film they saw on their first date, might not even remember that they went to the cinema on that occasion. The young Bernard, lying in a field beside her, turning towards her and holding a cornflower against her cheek, near the blue of her eye, seems almost like a different man, a lover she once had. She keeps him in an envelope in a drawer, that man who admired her calves; that man who, twisting the cornflower between his thumb and his index finger, said, ‘Come away with me.’

He used to fall asleep holding on to her, the weight of an arm and a leg pinning her to the mattress, the heat between them almost unbearable. Now he turns away, wants his space. Sometimes he wears a sleep mask and earplugs. These days, Bernard only notices Ester when other men do.

Ester does not normally enter the hotel through the front door, but today she does. She strides across the room, her heels beating time against the wooden floorboards. She walks towards the door at the side of the bar which leads to the bedrooms, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Bernard turning and watching her.

As she walks along the upstairs corridor, she hears the creak of the stairs behind her. She goes through the door marked ‘PRIVATE’ and into her and Bernard’s apartment. She waits in the bedroom.

She hears Bernard letting himself in and moments later he appears in the doorway. ‘What’s all this for?’ he asks, his gaze sweeping over her like a searchlight. He comes closer. ‘Who are you trying to impress?’ He holds her by the upper arms and squeezes, twisting her flesh a little, as if juicing an orange. Ester says nothing, just looks him in the eye until he relaxes his grip. She turns away so that he can undo the zip in the back of her dress. He does it slowly, and perhaps this is supposed to be seductive but she can only think that he is distracted by something or that he is warily delaying the moment when she will be undressed.

With Ester’s zip undone, Bernard walks round to his side of the bed. He closes the curtains but the room remains light. He sits down on the edge of the mattress to unlace his shoes, unbuckle his belt, unbutton his shirt. He looks at Ester and looks away. She steps out of her shoes and slips off her dress and stands by the bed in her knickers. Bernard pulls back the covers so that she can get under. She can feel where he held her, where his fingers pressed into her skin, where the evidence, the small, round bruises, will be later. The heel of one foot, rubbed by her new shoes, bleeds lightly into the bedsheet.