This Must Be the Place (48 page)

‘I said, you’re right,’ Daniel mutters, raising his eyes to look at him. ‘I’m sorry, man. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over … I just … Seeing you, you know, brings it all back and … I thought for a minute there when I heard you at the door that … well, that she had come too and that maybe … I don’t know … I don’t know … I just … I don’t know anything any more.’

He puts his hands over his face and sits like that, on his sofa. After a moment, Lucas moves towards him, cautiously at first. Then he sits next to him. He puts a tentative hand on Daniel’s shoulder. ‘Listen, it’s OK.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Daniel keeps muttering into his hands. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s really OK. We both lost it a bit there. I know you didn’t mean those things. I know you love Zhilan. You’re her favourite uncle. She’s always saying that.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Daniel says, lifting his head, rubbing at his face with the flat of his hands. ‘That makes me feel like shit. Kick a man while he’s down, why don’t you?’

‘It’s a good thing, a nice thing, being someone’s favourite uncle.’ Lucas gives him a clap on the shoulder. ‘You should be proud.’

Daniel pushes himself upright, sniffing. ‘Proud I am most definitely not right now.’ He moves around the coffee-table and out of the room. ‘Can I get you something? You want a drink?’

Lucas hesitates. ‘A drink? You mean—’

‘I mean a drink,’ Daniel calls from the kitchen. ‘A beverage. Of a hot temperature and a non-alcoholic nature. PG-rated liquid in a mug.’

Lucas smiles. ‘Then, yes. Please. That would be great.’ He gets up and goes to the window. He takes a deep, uneven breath, then another. What a weird thing that was. How did everything get so scrambled so fast? Would he really have punched Daniel back there? What a strange thought.

He lifts his shoulders and lets them fall. Things are back on track now. This is good. Things are looking up. They have made a breakthrough, of sorts. The dilapidated concrete courtyard that passes for a garden in Daniel’s block of flats has taken on a less gloomy aspect. Lucas is sure, fairly sure, that he can make out the green spears of crocuses pushing up from the ashy soil under a tree. A bird alights on a branch for a moment – Lucas sees the flash of a pink-brown underside, a chaffinch, perhaps – and then is gone. He feels himself expanding with relief, feels the earlier adrenalin dispersing. He will be able to tell Claudette that Daniel is, if not exactly well, then showing signs of recovery. He is not painfully thin, as he was a few months ago; he is not too jaundiced. The flat isn’t completely chaotic; it could be rated, in his opinion, as the dwelling of someone who is making progress. Claudette worries about Daniel constantly, is consumed with concern for him, despite how difficult he has made—

Lucas catches sight of something on the wall. A photograph of Marithe, tacked above a desk. He ducks his head to look at it as it isn’t one he can recall seeing before. In it, Marithe is wearing a denim jacket and she smiles at the camera, her mouth laced with braces. Lucas frowns. Marithe has never, to his knowledge, worn braces: Claudette loathes them, calls orthodontistry ‘child abuse’. Then the realisation hits him. It’s not Marithe. Of course it’s not Marithe. It’s Phoebe. How could he have been so stupid? Lucas looks at her, at Phoebe, the lost daughter, looks right into her eyes, which are crinkled as she must have been facing into the sun, and he gets the urge to reach his hand into the frame of the photograph, to push through its celluloid surface and take hold of her as she was on that day, far away, across the Atlantic, to grasp that sunburnt wrist and to hang on, to never let go.

He allows his eyes to drift sideways, along the wall above Daniel’s desk. Another picture of Phoebe, older in this one, with her arm around Daniel, Niall standing behind them both. A couple of Calvin and Marithe, one with Ari, in the garden in Donegal. There are several of Claudette, Lucas notes with a grimace, some recent, one of her pregnant, possibly with Marithe, one of her beside a beach campfire, an old publicity shot of her wearing a négligée and a peculiar hat, hair draped over her shoulder. Lucas looks away from this, at a map tacked to the wall. It appears to be the Scottish Borders, with Xs marked in red ink, like a child plotting treasure. A murky, worn photograph of a woman with sharp features, wearing a black cloak, the kind of thing you might put on at Hallowe’en, standing under a crenellated archway, eyeing the camera with a taut, appraising glance.

‘You sure you’ve seen everything?’

Lucas whips round. Daniel is standing in the doorway, two mugs held in his hands.

‘There isn’t anything you missed?’ Daniel’s voice is low with menace and Lucas can see that the other Daniel, the Daniel they all know and love, who reappeared for a moment there, has been subsumed by this other, frightening, furious alter-ego. ‘Are you sure you committed it all to memory?’ He strides across the room and Lucas can’t help himself – he takes a step back. Daniel puts down the mugs on the desk edge. ‘Did you see this?’ He yanks the map of the Borders from the wall and hurls it towards Lucas. ‘And this?’ The photo of the woman in the cloak. ‘How about this? And this?’ Pages, letters, photographs are ripped out of drawers and files and hurled into the space between the two men and still Daniel keeps talking. ‘Make sure you tell her that, yes, I was fired. My compassionate leave magically morphed into a termination of employment. Don’t leave out that I’ve got a restraining order on me, from my friend Todd. Be sure to say that I’m still fixating – her word – on my ex-girlfriend, the one who killed herself. Or did I kill her? I never can work that one out. One of the two, anyway. Maybe you’d like copies of all these. I’ll make you copies. So you can go back to your sister and give her the ammunition she needs, so she can put in a claim that I am unfit, unworthy, that I mustn’t see my children, that they must be kept from me, but you tell her’ – Daniel is yelling now, at the top of his voice – ‘you tell her I won’t have it. I won’t take it lying down. I won’t have anyone do that to me again. I will see those kids, I will. She can send whoever she likes with whatever fucking papers she likes but nobody –
nobody
– is going to take my kids away from me.’

‘Daniel, listen,’ Lucas says. He is near the exit. He has made sure of this. Three steps, maybe four, and he would be at the flat’s door, the one that would lead him out into the corridor and then the lobby. ‘Claudette has no intention of stopping you seeing the children. You know that. She wants you to see them. She would do anything to make that happen.’

Daniel is still ranting: ‘She’s even got Niall there now, telling him God knows what, getting him on her side. I don’t know how she does it, how she exerts this power over—’

‘It was you who sent Niall to her. Remember? You even drew him a map so he could find the house. And you know what? It was exactly the right thing to do. Niall is doing really well, he’s—’

‘He is?’

From across the littered room, Daniel looks at him, chest heaving.

Lucas nods. ‘I was there two weeks ago. Niall is in good form.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Claudette has him out in the greenhouse, tending her courgette plants. He’s teaching the kids geology. They go off on walks together with these little hammer things. Calvin has a rock collection now. Niall’s helping him label and classify it.’ Lucas pauses. ‘She wants to be fair to you. She wants it to be amicable. She says she’ll give you however much you—’

‘I don’t want her goddamn money,’ Daniel snaps. ‘She knows that.’

‘Well, either way, she wants you to see the kids. She just doesn’t want them to see you like this.’

Daniel glowers at him, fists clenched.

‘Can you understand that? She wants more than anything for you to be a father to them but, Daniel, think about it. Would you want Marithe to see you in this state? Would you want her to come to this flat, to spend the night? Can you picture her and Calvin here, as it is right now?’

Daniel drops his gaze.

‘You need to find a way through this,’ Lucas says. ‘You need to get yourself together. Do you think you can do that? Daniel? Do you?’

Always to Be Losing Things

Rosalind, Bolivia, 2015

When the driver comes, stumping wordlessly out of the hut, laden with sacks of food and flagons of water, and flings open the doors of the truck, the group of waiting people seem to hesitate, hang back, to gaze up at the sky or glance at their watches or make some final adjustments to their backpacks.

Nobody, Rosalind sees, wants to get in first. Nobody wants the back seat.

Suppressing a teacherly sigh (because, really, isn’t this the kind of behaviour more suited to children on a school trip?), she steps forward, places her bag on the dirt track and climbs in.

The interior of the truck, van, whatever you want to call it – it resembles most a Land Rover her uncle used to drive, a lifetime ago in Suffolk – is airless, musky and smells vaguely mouldy. A fecund, lichenous, hothouse scent. Rosalind seats herself in the furthest corner, by the window: she isn’t prepared to forgo that privilege.

She and this group of people, none of whom she has ever met before, are to spend the next few days making their way by truck to the Salar de Uyuni, a salt desert in the Bolivian Altiplano.

When she booked her place, the man in the little adobe house that served as the tour office had looked at her doubtfully, taking in her silk shirt, her sleek white hair, held back in a velvet band, her gold earrings, her pigskin document case. It is, madam, he had said, in halting, formal English, very rough. No hotel room. Dormitory only. She had replied, in her flawless Spanish, honed from three decades of living in South America:
No me importa
. It doesn’t matter. Nothing, you see, she had to stop herself saying to him, matters any more.

Rosalind directs her gaze at their destination but the periphery of her vision takes in her fellow passengers as they clamber in. What the back seat may lack in comfort is made up for in vantage-point.

The large, bespectacled man is the first to board, just as she’d somehow suspected – he is closest in age to her, albeit younger by a couple of decades – folding up his considerable height to fit through the door. He is succeeded by the Swiss couple, a boy with a grimy tracksuit top, half a beard and his bafflingly beautiful girlfriend. The boy puts out his cigarette before he gets on board, Rosalind is pleased to see, but throws the butt on the ground. They, with the self-assurance peculiar to youth, slide themselves onto the front seat, beside the driver, thereby securing themselves the best view. The lone man in his late twenties, who has not yet spoken a word, climbs in last. He makes no eye contact with any of them and sits in the middle row before proceeding to unpack some kind of equipment, possibly photographic, piece by piece.

‘Mind if I sit here?’ The tall man is asking, in an American accent, indicating the seat beside her, stooping in the confined space, grimacing slightly, as if the movement gives him pain.

Rosalind gestures assent with an open palm and he sits down with a crash, causing her to ricochet upwards, once, twice.

She has never been substantial of physique. Like a bird, her lacrosse teacher at school used to say, but a quick one. ‘Nightingale’, her husband had called her, in the early days of their marriage. ‘Spry’ is the word used for people of her age, isn’t it? Horrible word, Rosalind reflects, like a mixture of ‘spray’ and ‘why’.

She turns her face towards the window, just as her seat companion speaks: ‘So, you’re going on the trek?’

I would have thought that was fairly obvious, she wants to reply, but has had experience of Americans taking this kind of dry British remark the wrong way so keeps it to herself, merely nodding and saying, ‘Yes.’ She then feels that the single word might come across as rather reserved, so adds: ‘I’m very much looking forward to it.’

The bespectacled American is expending a great deal of effort patting his pockets, leaning forward and back, delving into his jacket, inside and out.

‘Have you lost something?’ Rosalind enquires.

‘No … It’s just … I thought I had …’ He twists round to find his bag, twists back, then yanks his passport out of it. ‘Oh. There it is.’

Rosalind bestows upon him one of her understanding yet distant smiles: the ones she used to use for the servants, for her husband’s secretaries, for waiting staff at receptions and parties. The smile that says, while I am fully appraised of and sympathetic to your plight, I do not wish to involve myself further. The last thing she needs on this trip is to take charge, to feel responsible for a disorganised male.

Two months ago – can it really have only been that long? – she had been going through the contents of the high cupboards in their bedroom, with a view to what she should take, what she should leave for the servants, what she should throw away. Her husband had been a foreign correspondent in Chile for over twenty years and they had lived all that time in a house high up in the Santiago hills, with its terrace hung with bougainvillaea, the parrots that screeched in the mornings, its irrigation pipes of verdigrised copper. And now they were leaving: her husband was retiring, and they were going to live in a cottage in Dorset, near where he had grown up. She had seen photographs of the cottage: it had a blue door and red splashes of hollyhocks growing up the walls and windows latticed with lead. There was a kitchen with an electric cooker: she would have to learn to cook again. She used to know, a long time ago; she was sure she would remember. There they would be, in bucolic retired bliss, with the hollyhocks and the electric cooker, for ever, or for at least as long as they wanted.

But the problem was these papers. These lists of figures. These columns of debit, these total amounts now due, these receipts of payment sent. There were bills for in-college dining, for extra-curricular sports, for chess club. There were charges for bedding, for heating, for textbooks.

Rosalind had gone through them all, one by one. She had arranged them chronologically, as was her wont, the most recent on top. She had the urge to find a file for them. She even thought about clipping them together.