* * *
COCO WENT FIRST, with the torch; Lily stumbled after; Clare carried Rose. Water was running in a little stream down the edge of the road where they walked; the night was full of the noise of rushing water. Soon Clare felt the water in her socks inside her boots. It was dark, but once their eyes adjusted they could make out each other’s shapes and the bulk of the hedge against the sky; perhaps there was a moon behind the clouds. Coco and Lily trudged ahead in a mute stoicism. Straggling wet stems from the hedge smacked across them; a bramble ripped Clare’s cheek and then snagged on Rose’s tights. As soon as they were around a bend in the road and out of sight of the lights of the car, Clare was convinced the whole expedition was insane. The village might be five miles away, or ten. There might be a house five hundred yards the other way down the road, its lights hidden by a dip in the land. Rose was so heavy. Clare wondered how long she would be able to carry her: another five minutes, or ten?
She stopped.
— Oh, God, she said. Are we doing the right thing?
Pale blobs of faces turned to look toward her.
— We could have just waited in the car for someone to come along and help us, said Coco.
— But perhaps no one would have come.
— Surely someone would.
— Then they’ll pass us now. We can wave and stop them.
— But we’ll have to be careful. We’re not wearing anything white, we won’t show up much.
Lily without a word pressed her chin in Clare’s coat and stretched up her arms pleadingly; it was her baby gesture, meaning she wanted to be picked up.
— Can’t you see? How can I? Do you seriously think I can carry two of you? Actually, I can’t even carry one. She pulled apart Rose’s wet woolen mittens from where they were clasped at the back of her neck and slithered her down to the ground. There. We all have to walk. We just have to walk. I’m not going back to sit in that car and wait, like a sitting target. This is England, not Russia or somewhere. There’ll be a house soon. When we get to the top of the hill we’ll see lights. Then we can telephone.
She held Rose’s hand and they toiled on. They were splashing through such deep water it was like walking upstream. Then Rose tripped and, although she dangled from Clare’s hand and didn’t go down completely, her legs and skirt got soaked. Clare picked her up and carried her again, and felt the wet soaking through her own coat to her skin.
Rose moaned and shivered.
— Shut up, said Clare. Stop it.
* * *
CLARE HAD BEEN READING Tolstoy’s Resurrection. (It was packed in one of the bags in the back of the car.) She thought there were two ways you could read it, either with your defenses up or your defenses down. If you read it with your defenses up, you could cleverly perceive all the ways it was unbalanced and twisted by certain sexual obsessions. For instance, the portraits of the wealthy women in the novel are so distorted and uncompassionate, loaded with Tolstoy’s disgust at how he desires them, their flattering flirtations and their naked shoulders.
But she was wondering about that now. What if the cleverness to see those twisted things was just another kind of complacency, to defend oneself against the truth in the book? A privileged wealthy man sees a prostitute tried for murder. He recognizes her as a girl he once seduced; he understands the falsity in his own life and the inequity in his society; he gives up everything to follow the girl to Siberia and offers to marry her, not because he desires her again (apparently he does not) but to redeem himself, to do right.
He changes his life.
What if this expressed a true possibility?
Clare thought while she was reading this novel that perhaps in her life she was wrong, she was perverted, she was in her foolishness and vanity sacrificing something precious. What if she was leaving a good man and breaking up a family, not even for love but just for curiosity, out of dissatisfaction? What if she was doing this not, as she had believed, out of deep inner need but in fact because she was following a pattern, a seductive and flattering and false suggestion that flowed at her on all sides from novels and films and advertising, about the importance, the paramount and endless intricate intriguing importance, of her own fulfillment?
* * *
THE WIND DROPPED and the rain eased off. The night dripped and rustled; there were stinks of rank vegetation and dung. They reached the top of the road where they had left the car, and turned left, and then right, Clare trying to remember their route when they’d come the other way. They must have reached the top of a slope because they found themselves climbing down again, but they hadn’t seen any lights. For a while, Clare found, you could achieve a kind of mechanical equilibrium, where your body repeated the round of movements that produced a forward motion while your mind floated detached somewhere outside: presumably this was what soldiers did when they marched. But the moment she was aware she had achieved this equilibrium, it was spoiled by consciousness; she became painfully aware of how difficult each effort was, and then her movement disintegrated, she stepped onto something awkward underfoot, a branch or a stone, Rose slid down her hip, her back ached, her restraining hands parted under Rose’s weight, she simply couldn’t move forward any farther. She had to let Rose slither to the ground again.
They heard the sound of a car, then saw its lights. Partly Clare was concerned to press them all back safely into the hedge, partly she was trying to think how to stop the car and ask for help. It took a while to catch up with them, dipping out of sight, winding behind a hill and reemerging; and then, when it was close, its lights and speed and the roar of its engine were overwhelming. Clare, waving her hat at the car and pointlessly shouting, felt a strong embarrassment. Who would these people be, what would they think of her, wandering with her little vulnerable brood astray in the wild night?
Somehow, in the disorientation of the approaching din and glare, Rose slipped out of Clare’s grasp. She was well beyond the age of darting heedlessly into traffic; she might have been trying to attract the car’s attention because she was fed up with walking, or she might have panicked at its oncoming noise and been unable to escape in any direction except directly at what she feared. The slick blue of her raincoat was suddenly illumined in the car’s lights. Clare screamed: her hands flew to block her mouth as if to stop what was going to happen coming out from there. Coco threw himself at Rose and snatched her back out of the way of the car as it passed in a waist-high spew of water: she landed on her face at the side of the road with Coco half fallen on top of her. He smacked her once heavily across the bottom in the wake of the drama of the receding car.
— You naughty naughty little girl, he shouted.