But in the night she was cold and woke up shivering and couldn’t fall asleep again. And although she tried not to wake him, awareness must have reached him — even in the deep chambers of his sleep — of her consciousness, active, close to him: and he surfaced. She was shuddering; her teeth were actually chattering together. He reached out an arm from his sleeping bag, touched the canvas of the tent above his face, found her huddled shape.
— Are you cold?
— Bram, I’m so cold, she said, muffled, from her clenched jaws. I can’t get warm, what’s the matter with me?
— I don’t know. It could be shock, perhaps, because you’re upset.
— I’m so sorry.
He half sat up. I could unzip these sleeping bags and zip them up together. If you’d like. If you think that would help.
For a minute she didn’t say anything. You don’t think I set this up deliberately, do you? I know how you might think I’m using this, to get my way.
— I don’t.
— OK, then.
He found the torch and by its light he sorted out the sleeping bags into one double one, and then climbed back in beside her: before he switched the torch off the beam picked out a tangle of fair hair and a triangle of creamy skin behind her ear: her face was buried against the rough sleeve of her sweater. In the dark he pressed himself against her where she was turned away from him and put his arms around her. It was strange that she could be cold; she felt like a flood of warmth against him which he then poured back into her; gradually, as he held her, her shuddering eased off and her rigid limbs relaxed. They didn’t speak another word. After a while she turned around in his arms and they found each other’s faces in the dark by kissing.
It should have been awkward, making love through all the layers of their clothes, but perhaps because he’d wakened out of deep sleep and was still half dreaming, he seemed to find his way through them with supreme ease, parting them and pushing them aside; they seemed in his dream organic layers through which he was penetrating to the hot center of her.
TOBY BOOKED A FLIGHT home from Kathmandu on what turned out to be a bandh, a holy day when all wheeled vehicles are forbidden and those who venture out risk being set alight or stoned. He could not find anyone willing to take him to the airport. So at dawn he climbed over the wall of the compound where he was staying, walked with his pack for about a mile, then managed to hail the driver of a stray tempo, a motorized rickshaw, who was prepared to risk it before the 6 A.M. bandh deadline. The airport was shut when he got there; he leaned his pack against the concrete guard post at the entrance, sat down beside it, and waited. After a while they opened up and let him inside. It was evening before he got on a flight to Delhi. From Delhi — after a night spent asleep in a hard plastic waiting room seat, embracing his pack — he flew to Rome, where there were more delays; and from Rome to Heathrow. He arrived at Heathrow at eleven o’clock at night, the second night of his journey home.
From Heathrow he telephoned his mother. Angie answered the phone.
— Could I speak to Naomi, please? he asked.
Her voice was gruff and terse. Who wants Naomi?
Toby cleared his throat. He was embarrassed to say; he and Angie hadn’t parted on good terms when he left to go on his travels three months before.
— Naomi doesn’t live here. Naomi’s over. Naomi’s dead, said the voice, not bothering to wait for him to go on.
Then she hung up.
Toby frowned. He gave up the phone booth to a girl backpacker waiting behind him, went to an empty seat, and carefully counted over the English notes in his purse. There was not enough for a coach ticket home; he would have to hitch. He did not really believe that his mother was dead; if she had been dead, her friend would have listed those three things differently, surely: death would have come first. If someone was dead, you did not begin with other things about them. But nonetheless, an anxiety about his mother took up its old place in his chest like a little hard ugly manikin.
After waiting for about an hour at an intersection, he got a lift with an all-night lorry driver going west who took him to the nearest motorway junction to home; then he had to walk for three or four miles through the sleeping outskirts of the city, hoping he’d see a bus or a taxi or a phone booth. When he did find a phone he discovered that all the coins left in his pocket were rupees. He decided to go to the house in Benteaston where his half sister Tamsin lived with her mother; his father’s house was another long walk across the city in Kingsmile. Benteaston was on his way in from the motorway, Victorian and Edwardian terraces crawling up and down the hills; always respectable, now even desirable and professional.
He didn’t want to wake Tamsin’s mother by ringing the doorbell, so he left his pack in the front porch, went around to the back lane, and climbed the wall into the garden. Tamsin’s room was upstairs at the back. He couldn’t find any gravel — it was very dark, it was three in the morning — so he had to scoop up a handful of earth to throw at her window; it hit the glass with a soft spattering thud. On the third attempt Tamsin came to the window in pale pajamas and opened it.
— Fuck off! she hissed loudly into the garden. Whoever you are, fuck off, you stupid bastard, or I’ll come down there and blow your fucking head off with my shotgun.
— Tamsin! It’s me! It’s Toby! I didn’t want to wake your mum, but I’ve just come home.
— Toby! You dickhead, you complete dickhead. Why didn’t you phone like normal people do? Wait there!
Lights went on: a few moments later she was opening the back door for him, then he was inside the kitchen, blinking and grinning while Tamsin kissed and hugged him, not quite able to believe it was possible to wander so very far away on such a long leash and then wind it in again and find oneself back here in the exact same small familiar place, the neat modern kitchen with matching oven mitts and tea towels, fresh herbs growing on the windowsill. And he had managed somehow to forget while he was away Tamsin’s precise aura like a groomed fastidious cat; even woken in the middle of the night in pajamas she was neat and self-possessed and her straight dark shoulder-length hair looked brushed. She had long dark eyes full of cat scorn, too, and eyebrows that met in the middle: an Aztec, their father called her.
— Have you really got a shotgun?
— Oh, yes, Toby, really, I keep a shotgun under my bed; didn’t you notice all the holes in the wall where I’ve been practicing? Idiot; what do you think? And I suppose you’ve had all your luggage stolen, have you? That would be so typical!
— It’s on the front porch.
— So go and get it! And you probably want me to make you a cup of tea. Although I ought to warn you before you touch meat or drink in this house that it seems to have become some weird sort of women’s refuge. Seething with evening primrose oil and female angst and synchronized menstruation and all that. We have refugees. First Naomi moved in with us, then Clare.
— So Naomi’s here! And she’s all right?
There was a sulky downturn of the mouth whose edge was as sharp as if it was outlined in pencil. All right?
— I mean, alive. And well. Reasonably well.
— Oh, we’re all all right, if that’s what you mean by all right.
— Good. That’s good.
— As far as it goes.
Marian, Tamsin’s mother — tall and heavy and gray-haired, belted into an old-fashioned man’s dressing gown — came downstairs, woken up by the noise; then Clare, Tamsin’s older sister — pale and serious, with her hair in a plait. They stood sleepily around him in the kitchen in their nightclothes with puffy faces and frizzy hair, giving off the warmth and the yeasty smell of bed, exclaiming and smiling and touching and kissing him. Marian put the kettle on.