— Don’t, said Bram, smiling. What are you doing?
— Play, she said. Play with me.
— I don’t want to. I don’t hate you.
— When you first kiss me — you smell of peat smoke and animals — you think of your mother, who already looks like an old woman because of her life of hard labor. You want to refuse me, you pull your mouth away. But I touch you — like this …
Bram never spoke a single word that she could seize as token that he had lent himself to her games. But he couldn’t close his ears; she cheated her way — that was how she thought of it — inside his desires, contaminating them. And if he was sullen and reluctant and half-disgusted, he only played the part she had devised for him.
It wasn’t only unionist and republican. She did Miss Julie and her servant; the society beauty tempting the hermit in his hut; the young trade union leader and the spoiled factory owner’s wife. She did Bertha Mason and Mr. Rochester. “He used to visit her, you know, in the attic. Even when Jane was sleeping under the same roof.” They were all costume dramas and period pieces. She detailed the furniture of the rooms, and the clothes that came off or half off, the complicated olden-times knots and hooks and buttons that had to be fumbled with hasty, sweating hands.
She was disgusted with herself; she winced with shame the next day, remembering. There had been months at a time in her life when if she caught sight of the suckings of mouths or the slithering of oiled bodies on someone’s television she only felt ennui and numbness. Now her obsession was a burden to her, heavy and distorting. Just before they came away on holiday she had been to the optician’s for a routine test, checking the prescription for her reading glasses. The examination was carried out by a young man she had not seen before, rather shy, with a mop of dark fluffy hair and Wallace and Gromit socks. It was all perfectly straightforward. And yet when he turned the lights off, her heart had pounded with excitement.
— Which looks brighter, red or green?
— Is it clearer with this one? Or this one? Clearer now? His woolly hair brushed her cheek, he was breathing close to her face, he held up for her to follow his little torch with a lit bulb the size of a seed pearl. She thought, Now, now, he’ll touch me. But all the time she actually had on her face those grotesque test frames full of lenses, or he’d been instructing her to look left, look up, look down, peering into the red of her peeled up lids or pulled-down rims. How could she have thought of sex? What was this sickness that made the whole world reach her through its prism, suffused in its slippery drugged rainbow excitements?
This rainbow revelation that then like a light went out?
Eventually, Bram refused her.
— Pretend I’m a senior figure in the KGB, she whispered. You’re a dissident, a young physics lecturer who’s also written a book on Dostoevski. You’re brought to my room, for interrogation—
— Oh, for Christ’s sake, he said. Don’t you think that’s a bit off?
— A bit off? Her laugh was meant to convey insouciance, amusement at his priggishness. But she also felt a wince of exposure, the same as when she turned off the ignition in the car and the throb of supporting music died. What d’you mean by a bit off?
For some long minutes he didn’t answer. Her perky smile hung in the dark like the Cheshire cat’s.
— If you don’t know, he said, then I can’t tell you.
She sat up in bed. It was cold in the room, the nights were cold because the days were so clear. She felt the chill strike her bare shoulders; she took it like a punishment. It was hours before dawn.
— OK, she said into the dark, perkily, bleakly.
* * *
BRAM AND TINSLEY showed the children how to build a dam (a “barrage,” the children called it, because they all knew about the one that was being built at home). Tinsley in cut-off jeans stood with the water riding against her knees in the deepest part of the river and assumed command. The children, who had been prized unwillingly from in front of the Discovery channel and turned out into the sunshine blinking and wincing, were soon organized into an eager workforce.
Clare watched from her vantage point in Opie’s den, where she had taken her book.
— We need big ones! shouted Tinsley. Big ones to make a strong base.
Bram helped Coco with an overambitious huge rock that came away from its bed like a tooth from a socket; he solemnly accepted the handfuls of wet grit Rose brought.
— Too small! said Tinsley.
— No, this is fine for filling in, said Bram equably. Good girl, Rose.
— How deep is it going to get? Coco asked Tinsley; he pushed his glasses up on his nose and stood with his hands on his hips surveying the work. Clare feared he was more like her than like his father, whose every gesture he slavishly copied (except the one with the glasses, which Bram didn’t need).
— How deep d’you want it?
— Deep enough to sail the inflatable dinghy? Coco shrugged his skinny shoulders.
— Put your back into it then.
Clare had thought the children would lose interest after fifteen minutes, but an hour later Coco and Lily were still doggedly, silently working, lost in the task, all their awareness focused on supplying the steady line of stones advancing across the burbling evasive water. Rose was filtering dirt through her fingers at the river’s edge, imagining she was part of the project because she was in its orbit. Conversation had narrowed to a soothing transactional minimum.
— We need a good one to go in here.
— Alert! Alert! We have a collapse.
— Pass me that one, quick.
— Help me with this, Daddy?
Clare thought, They will remember this, when they think about why they love their father.
It was what she had loved him for too: his quiet competence, a remote unassailable presumption of the one way to do things, a right way. She watched his hands, placing stones, helping Lily pick her way in the current, pushing back his tangled hair from his hot forehead. He had that kind of fine fair hair that separates naturally into curling strands, like a Renaissance painting. He let it grow too long because he didn’t care about it; she wished he would have it clipped fashionably close. His hands were like his father’s, brown and small and firm. In the evenings these hands moved chess pieces patiently, teaching Coco or losing to Tinsley (she played in the station in the arctic); or they chose cards in family games of solo whist where the Vereys could not completely disguise their relief that Clare didn’t want to make an awkward fifth player (Opie didn’t play either). Of course Bram was talking to the children all the time as well; he probably talked to them more than she did, explaining how things worked, explaining why it was better to do things in a certain way, explaining to them what was dangerous. He sometimes told Clare off, for driving with her tire pressures crazily low, or using a vacuum with a broken plug whose live wires were exposed.
She couldn’t think how to complain of him. She ought to have a complaint, oughtn’t she, for an alibi? He was uncommunicative sometimes. And he didn’t like many people, much; he was always friendly and polite, but in private he was unforgiving if he found out anyone’s vanity or pretension. He knew things but he didn’t invent things. Those didn’t sound like accusations; they sounded like goodness.
When the dam was built there was a little lip of captured water behind it, and they did just manage to skull the play dinghy across it amid shrieks of triumph; the children splashed and scooped the water with large exaggerated gestures as if the pool they had made were deeper and more miraculous than it actually was. After tea there was consternation because Lily found three little dark fishes swimming up and down in it. She was dismayed at the idea of the bewilderment of the little fish and she haunted the bank, coaxing them with chirruping calls to a place where they could swim over; eventually Bram (who might even in his calm way have also been concerned for the fish) broke down the dam and made a channel for them to escape through. Coco and Tinsley disapproved, and the evening ended on a sour note. The fish stayed swimming around in the pool anyway, although they were gone by morning.