The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (46 page)

‘Of course it’s a park,’ he says. ‘You didn’t think this was real countryside, did you?’

Again she laughs. But it seems he’s not joking.

‘Who lives in the farmhouses, Laura? Who lives in the farm workers’ cottages, and the stables, and the barns?’

‘Don’t be silly, Nick. There aren’t any horses any more, or hayricks, or picturesque peasants.’

‘Or farms or farmers or agriculture. Do you know what percentage of the rural English population works in agriculture? Guess.’

‘I don’t know. I’ve no idea.’

‘Nought point three per cent. One third of one per cent! The English countryside’s economy runs on commuters and tourism.’

An edge of real anger in his languid voice. Where’s all this coming from?

‘Have you been studying rural economics or something?’

‘I pick up newspaper reports.’

‘Why? What do you care?’

‘I care about landscape. You know that.’

‘It’s because you live in California, isn’t it? You’re thousands of miles away dreaming of England as it used to be, and it offends you that it’s changed. You want it to be all Constable out there, don’t you?’

Nick looks over the peaceful scene and doesn’t answer. Laura feels irritated. What are they doing arguing about the English countryside, for God’s sake?

So what else did I expect us to do alone together?

‘The thing is,’ says Nick quietly, ‘it’s fake. It’s an image. The final triumph of centuries of mythologizing the rural scene is to turn Arcadia into a consumer product.’ He waves at the view. ‘It’s not countryside any more. It’s city life, with the added luxury of space. City people earning city incomes occupying large individual plots of land. It looks like the old countryside because the buildings are still there, and the hedges, and the woodlands. But the country way of life has gone, and the city way of life has taken its place. This is a whole new culture, Laura. This is the suburbs gone to heaven. This is front gardens on steroids. You’re living in a fantasy land.’

Now she gets it. Stupid not to have spotted it sooner. This isn’t some generalized interest in social change. This is an assault on her chosen way of life. Nick has never raised his voice but she can hear the bitterness, she can feel the need to despise.

‘Maybe so,’ she says. ‘But we like it.’

‘I can believe
we
like it,’ he retorts. ‘I don’t believe
you
like it.’

She flushes. He wants to split her from Henry and the children.

‘We do and I do,’ she says. ‘Believe what you please.’

She’s angry at him now, offended by his assumption of superiority. And she’s angry at herself, because she wanted him to kiss her.

She sets off along the South Downs Way towards the radio masts. Nick falls in beside her. He shows no signs of having registered her anger.

‘I know you better than you know yourself, Laura,’ he says. ‘You can’t live a lie.’

‘I’m not living a lie.’

‘I think you are. Or trying to, at least. I think you’ve let yourself get trapped in this make-believe world and you’ve no idea what you’re doing here. All you know is, this isn’t it. This isn’t the life you were meant to live.’

‘You have no idea. No idea.’

She walks faster, impelled by her anger and also by dread. He talks on, his soft voice burrowing into her self-belief.

‘You knew it once. You felt it once. There is another way of living, where you’re alive, truly alive. You’ve been there, Laura, and so have I. Think of that, and then think of this. How can you tell me this isn’t half a life?’

‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘Just shut up.’

‘It frightens you. Of course it does. That’s because you know I’m right. You know you can’t go on like this. You’re being suffocated here, Laura. You can hardly breathe. You—’

‘Shut up! Shut up!’

‘If that’s what you want. But you know I’m right.’

They walk in silence. Laura is outraged that he should mount this attack on her current life, about which he knows nothing. And all for his own selfish purposes.

His own selfish purposes.

‘Why are you getting at me like this, Nick?’

‘I’m not getting at you. I’m trying to save you.’

‘Well, I don’t need saving, thank you very much.’

She leads them off the high ridge of the Downs onto the long diagonal track that descends towards home. Now in the lee of the wind the sounds of the world change round them. Here in this sculpted hollow they look out as from an amphitheatre at the show that is England in springtime.

‘You’re wrong, Nick,’ she says. ‘I love my family, and my home, and my life. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He stops. He has his head down, looking at his shoe as he scuffs the stones of the track.

‘Please,’ he says.

One word, spoken softly, and everything changes. He’s saying, I don’t want this argument. This is hurting me. I don’t mind being wrong. I mind the distance between us.

‘Please.’

He looks up now, his eyes on hers as she has never seen him look before: uncertain, ready to take flight.

‘What is it you want, Nick?’ she says.

He says, ‘Stay.’

The word hangs in the air between them and fades and is gone. She can’t speak.

‘Stay with me. Come to California with me.’

For a few moments she allows the sleeping ghost of her past self to wake. She is twenty again and he has come back to her as she cried every night for him to come back. He loves her after all, as she knew he must. He needs her as she needs him. They are together again.

‘Is that what you came to England to say?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Why now?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m ready now. Maybe I’ve come to a fork in the road.’

‘You think we can pick up where we left off, after twenty years?’

‘No,’ he says humbly. ‘I just want to be with you, Laura.’

‘Why, Nick?’

‘Because there’s only you. Don’t you see? I had no choice but to find you again. There’s only you.’

‘But I’ve changed. You don’t know me. You think you do, but you don’t.’

‘People don’t change. Not in twenty years. Not in a lifetime. What was true when we were young is true still. We found each other then. That was the real thing. It’s still real today.’

Little by little, as she hears him, long-ago shadows are lifting in Laura. She begins to see more clearly. Pain and grief have a way of freezing time. She has preserved her memories of Nick intact through the years, ready for this moment of thaw. And with the thaw comes disintegration.

‘I think what I mean,’ she says, ‘is that you didn’t know me then.’

He flinches as if she has struck him.

‘Don’t say that to me,’ he says. ‘Tell me you can’t leave your children. That I can understand. But don’t rewrite history. Don’t take from me the one truth of my life.’

‘Nick, we were young. We were only just beginning to find out who we were. It wasn’t the greatest love affair in history. It was just the first time. For both of us.’

He stares at her, searching her face for a different truth that gives the lie to her words.

‘Do you really believe that?’

Down in the valley the little train rattles over the water meadows on its way from Eastbourne calling its cuckoo cry, peep-bo! peep-bo! It crosses the river where Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Stones in her pockets.

Don’t look at me like that.

‘You’re one of life’s wanderers, Nick. Go back to California. Write me a letter from time to time.’

He just goes on looking at her.

‘Say something.’

‘You call me a wanderer. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. If only you knew. I thought you knew.’

‘How could I know anything about you, Nick? You walked out of my life. You disappeared.’

‘And if your son walked out of your life? If you met him again twenty years later?’ The words coming faster now, under pressure. ‘Would you not know him? No! You’d take him in your arms and hold him tight and it would be as if you’d never been apart. Time is nothing, Laura! Let a thousand years pass! What we had, what we have, yes, what we have right now, whether you admit it or not, is real and true and rare. That’s what I’ve learned while I’ve been away from you. How rare it is to love.’

‘But to love someone you have to be there for them.’

‘I’ve always been there for you, Laura. I thought you knew. You couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see you but I was always there. And all the time I knew the day would come when we’d be together again. When you’d be close enough for me to reach out and touch.’

He reaches out one hand and touches her arm. She shivers.

‘All I can do is tell you how it is for me,’ he says. ‘If you doubt me, tell me to go and I’ll go. But I’ll still be there for you. All you have to do is call me, and I’ll come. If I have to wait till Henry dies and you’re a widow, I’ll wait. I don’t mind waiting. I’ll be there for you. That’s the only way I can show you what I say is true, and always will be.’

Jesus where did he learn this monstrous fidelity? Nick the bolter, Nick the heartbreaker, where are you now?

Wind ruffling his hair, sky shining round him like a halo. Lines on either side of his mouth. His eyes on her, never leaving her, needing her, wanting her. Old lovers are the best, they say. Anxiety shed, mutual desire pre-established, bodies no surprise. Except for the effects of passing time and childbirth and breastfeeding, nothing as firm as it once was. There was a time when she was so proud to hold his naked body in her arms. Her own naked body her gift.

His naked body in my arms.

Look away, Laura. Look away now and never look back.

‘We’d better get back.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We’ll go now.’

Then he kisses her. This is a non sequitur, she thinks, as she feels his arms pull her close, his lips find her lips. She does not resist or push him away. That would be unkind. And she has in a way invited it.

Oh, this is a kiss. Long time since I’ve been kissed like it matters. Except now that it’s come, it doesn’t matter after all.

He holds her in his arms, her head on his shoulder now, and she sees the green playing fields of the school in the valley below. White dots of schoolboys playing cricket. Could be Jack down there.

She feels no guilt because she knows this is an end not a beginning. She’s kissing goodbye to her youth, and to the hurt she has hoarded for too long.

So they part, and as she lets him go she feels the hope leave him at last.

They follow the descending path down the flank of the hill.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘You must have known I could never just walk out on my life.’

‘I can do it.’

‘You’ve got less to hold you.’

‘I have nothing to hold me.’ He throws her a look in which for the first time he allows her to glimpse his desolation. ‘Nothing.’

‘You’ve got your work. Your works of art.’

‘I buy and sell. That’s all.’

‘Then do something else.’

He gives a soft laugh.

‘This was my something else.’

He has felt the brush of her pity in that kiss as a fatal wound. He makes no more attempts to persuade her. He is withdrawing into whatever fortified place remains within him, for darkness is descending, and with night comes enemy attack. He wants to be gone from her now.

She drives him back to his hotel.

‘Don’t let it be another twenty years,’ she says.

He gives a half smile, a shrug, and turns away. As he goes up the steps into the hotel he raises one hand in a backward wave, but he does not look round.

When Laura takes off her walking jacket in the hall at home she finds the envelope he gave her. Inside the envelope is a plane ticket, a First Class open-dated return flight to Los Angeles, costing $12,600.

54

The animated Coca Cola bottle sails majestic as a space ship above the traffic. As it turns it grows in size, until the droplets can be seen gleaming on its glass flanks, promising cool refreshment to the swarm of people gushing out of the underpasses, bunching at the road crossings, streaming down the pavements. Then when the image can come no closer it dissolves into red lettering, a simple breathtakingly outrageous claim: the Real Thing.

Henry crouches on the pavement at the corner of Regent Street and Piccadilly by the Clydesdale Bank, seeking the exact point at which an approaching pedestrian’s head is level with the illuminated advertisement high above. Pale sunlight fails to dim the show of coloured lights.

‘This is where we do it,’ he says to Christina, who stands behind him notebook at the ready. ‘Has Aidan arrived yet?’

‘Just got here.’

They walk back together to Jermyn Street, where the crew minibus is parked in a specially reserved space outside Rowley’s restaurant. Ray and Oliver are peering in the window of Trumper’s, excited by the array of male grooming aids. Aidan Massey is standing by the minibus, watching himself in the tinted window while Rowan works on his hair.