While they were all on holiday together, Clare tried to keep out of sight that potential in her own family life for spilling over into martyrdom and hysteria. Coco worked droopingly through a whole sequence of symptoms from a sore throat to a sprained ankle, Lily made nightly scenes about spiders, Rose’s moaning and struggling ruined every day trip they tried to take her on, so that in the end Clare and Bram took it in turns to stay behind with her in the house. Clare was sure that when Tinsley and Bram and Opie were children they wouldn’t have wasted time quarreling about TV channels (the house had Sky) but would have escaped outdoors every possible minute to the lake and the woods and the ruined mill. Of course, she couldn’t have let her children do this even if they had wanted to; she would have thought it much too dangerous. That was a perception that had changed with the generations too.
Whenever Bram and his sisters did tell stories from their childhood, which wasn’t often because they had been brought up to be shy and skeptical of talking about themselves, the stories were never about fights but about projects carried out as a little team of siblings, loyal, intimate, peculiar, with passions distributed conveniently between them: Bram with his birds, Tinsley with her rocks, Opie with her snakes. One summer they built a tree house in their back garden in Oxford and slept in it every fine night. One holiday in Northumberland they repaired an old boat they found by the river and caulked it and painted it and gave it a name and took it on leaky trips out on the water. (They named it Shimmershy: Clare wondered which one of the girls — it must have been one of the girls — had given way to romance for an inspired moment.) Such stories as far as Clare was concerned belonged inside books and were unimaginable as real childhoods; it seemed wholly characteristic that while Bram and his sisters had been busy living these adventures she had only been busy reading about them.
* * *
GENNY TOOK COCO AND LILY and the others on an expedition looking for bones in the Burren; she was chief technician for the University Bone Collection at Oxford, trained as an animal behaviorist and now working for the archaeology department. Lily under her grandmother’s tutelage was getting quite bold and had even poked at a very dead cat at the side of the road with a stick while Genny pointed out the structure and articulation. (It didn’t unfortunately make any difference to her feelings about spiders.) Bram had managed to persuade his mother not to bring the cat home and boil it up for its skeleton — they had already done several voles and a pigeon, filling the house with a stink Clare had to wash out of her hair. She had learned long ago never to look under the lids of Genny’s saucepans. Coco had helped to bleach the bones and lay them out like exquisite puzzles on old seed trays in the plantless ruined conservatory. He had a pigeon wing, too, and had showed Clare condescendingly how it folded like a fan.
When they went to the Burren, Clare stayed at home with Rose and played David’s tapes on Coco’s Walkman. She sat on the gray crumbling steps of the portico at the front of the house to smoke one of the cigarettes she had bought on her last visit to the mini-market; the cigarettes too were a fetish item from her obsession, as if by accumulating around her objects and habits associated with David she could somehow translate herself inside his real presence. No other building, except some unused sheds and one wall of the ruined mill, was visible from where she sat; she could see the lake, the islands, a field where the hay was gathered into old-fashioned beehive-shaped stooks you never saw in England anymore. It was a ten-minute drive down to the village; at night, partly because of the trees planted closely around the house, you couldn’t see another light.
Rose had taken all her clothes off and, having achieved her point in getting out of the trip to the Burren, was rewarding Clare with her deep absorption in some rite involving small stones picked from the drive and carried off to a sorting place behind the rhododendrons. Clare made a pot of real coffee and brought it out into the sunshine for herself and Ray, Bram’s father, who was painting at the bottom of the rough sloping lawn with his back to her. In this household of practical people (Tinsley was a geologist in plate tectonics, Bram worked on a conservation project, Opie was a physiotherapist), Clare and Ray tended to get lumped together, as if they might help one another out and understand each other’s mysteries. Today it was possibly true that they shared a sense of respite in the absence of his wife and his children. He was really startled, coming up from concentration, when she brought him his coffee; he had the same forward-set lower jaw as Bram, so that his mouth closed with an expression of gentle trustingness like a ruminant, a vulnerable deer.
She sat on the stone steps with her novel turned face down beside her because she couldn’t concentrate on it. This was one of those moments given on earth like a promise of what’s possible: the palely veiled creamy blue sky, the water glinting, the sun-warmed stone against her skin, the heat on her shoulders, the loved child happy playing in the earth, all the loved family spread safely and at their proper distances like a constellation, so that she in her place, part of it, was both holding and held. In literature though, Clare thought, there is a notorious problem with heavenly peace. It is well known that it can only be appreciated through the glass of loss. It is only after Raskolnikov has struck the blow that cleaves him forever from ordinary happiness that he can perceive its possibility. It is only because Emma Bovary’s provincial Normandy is in the irrecoverable lost past that what seemed to her banal and smothering seems to us charming, mysterious, desirable. It is only from Paris that Joyce can love Dublin. She listened to the heartbeat-stimulating rhythms on her headphones that were like a message from another place.
Rose began to weave her into her game, including her in the circuit between the drive and the bushes, offering her little stones squeezed in earth-grubby fingers; every time she came close enough Clare captured her and kissed her, drinking in the smell of hot baby skin and hair and earth and vegetation, repentant already that this was not enough, that there was always more that one greedily wanted, more than whatever precious thing it was that one held real and live and finite in one’s hands. She was thinking about telephoning David. She hadn’t ever intended to telephone him from her holiday; her idea had been that if she simply held off from contacting him or from making any arrangements to see him, the decision about what she was going to do with him would make itself. But his telephone numbers were written in her diary, and the thought of them had begun to eat like acid into her idea.
She had written down the numbers, the mobile and the home number, a month ago, on the day she went up to meet David in London, telling Bram she was going to work at the British Library on her dissertation. She had fully expected that David would take her into his bed (the bed with the mirrors that she knew about from Helly, her friend, David’s girlfriend); she had not known if she would even use her return ticket. The numbers were in case David wasn’t there to meet her at the station; but he was, with his jacket slung on one finger over his shoulder, his thick brush of black hair that grew upward like an exclamation mark, his loud voice that overfilled wherever he was, his oblivious gifted swagger in the great city. Bram wouldn’t have understood how she wasn’t disappointed by David’s showing off, wouldn’t have understood how she drank that down as the very element of her pleasure.
But confusingly David hadn’t taken her into his bed, or even to his flat, but had taken her out for a Thai meal and then to an exhibition of disconcertingly sexual Helmut Newton photographs at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. With everything she knew about him — from Helly — she had assumed that he would be the one who would know how to bridge the unbridgeable transition between the animated conversation of friends and the first fumbles of acknowledgment, the first frank reachings-out. She had surely done enough by simply turning up. Didn’t he know to read that as her absolute surrender to whatever he wanted? But the more they talked the more the talk had seemed to pile up between them, solid and sensible as stone, separating them. All the time she was smiling and talking, putting on to the utmost an appearance of happy charm, her calculations were racing. Had she misunderstood him from the beginning? When he telephoned and said they should get together, had he meant just this, lunch and galleries? And she thought too, with humiliation, that unlike her he wasn’t desperate, he could afford to wait and see, he could afford to treat with respectful seriousness all the good reasons lunch and galleries were quite enough. She smothered a panicking sense that she would be betrayed into making a scene; she simply couldn’t bear to go home without the initiation she had come for.