There was no way of ever being quite sure, in the reconstructions afterward, whether the car would have hit Rose or not, if Coco hadn’t snatched her back. The car didn’t stop. Probably the driver never even saw them; or he shook his head at such irresponsible pedestrians.
Clare knelt on the road beside her. Is she all right?
Rose didn’t move. They shone the torch on her: the elastic on her hat was up under her nose; there was a smear of mud on her creamy cheek and a trickle of blood; her big eyes stared into a tangle of muddy roots in the hedge.
—’Course I’m all right, she said, willing there to be nothing dangerous or dreadful that had happened, that could touch her. She sat up.
Coco rocked on his haunches, shivering and chattering his teeth. I saved her life, he remarked experimentally.
— You ran into the road, Rosie, reproached Lily. How many times have you been told?
Clare sat in a pool of water. The rain began to fall again, the sound of the first drops sharp as a handful of thrown gravel, then the successive sweeps of it like a rustle of fine cloth through the trees, pressing, hastening.
— I can’t go on, she said. You go on without me. I just want to stay here and die.
The children peered into her face incredulously.
— Mum, don’t be stupid, said Coco, embarrassed for her.
— Mum’s stupid, said Rose, glad to distract attention from her own mistake.
Lily slipped her bare hand inside Clare’s sodden knitted glove and squeezed her fingers. Come on, Mummy darling, she said. We have to be brave.
— I don’t want to be brave, said Clare. She held up her face in the dark to the rain, taking her punishment. I can’t. I give up. It’s all my fault.
* * *
THAT SAME MORNING at eleven o’clock she had felt very differently about things. She had had a meeting with Tony Kieslowski, her supervisor for her PhD. Tony was in his thirties, single, American, plump, with soft eyes in a bruise-colored slack face, shoulder-length dark hair curling onto his collar: his appearance faintly reminiscent of the Romantic poets he specialized in. Clare had noticed this tendency of literary specialists toward a physical resemblance to their subjects: modernists in crumpled linen suits and James Joyce glasses, Jamesians with paunches and waistcoats and pocket watches, Plath fanatics with alpha-grade bright faces and long gathered skirts. She hadn’t liked Tony at first. He was always phoning to cancel meetings they had arranged — sometimes he even forgot they had arranged them and didn’t turn up — and she had thought him self-important, probably because he didn’t register the bright gift of intelligence she brought to unwrap at his feet and impress him. He was abrasive and opinionated; she heard from other students how he was resented and disliked.
Recently, though, she’d found herself taking pleasure in how genuinely distracted and disorganized he was: it made her imagine a life so different from her life with the children, where thought had to be fitted into little discrete spaces inside her routine. She imagined the slow ripening of Tony’s ideas in a rich vegetable chaos, uninterrupted by the petty necessities of mealtimes and housework. When she came to his office he would clear a space for her to sit by removing a heap of papers from a chair and then wouldn’t know where to put them down among the dead plants and cold coffee cups and mountains of other papers, so he’d stand holding on to them while he started to talk. He loved to talk. She loved it too, especially these abstract subjects: about genius (he scoffed and deconstructed the idea of genius, she defended it), about wilderness (he was susceptible to the idea of wilderness, she was skeptical), about the sublime. It was true that occasionally her mind wandered when he went on for a long time, and she waited impatiently to get her chance to speak. But she supposed that his eagerness to talk to her must mean he had begun to intuit her responsive intelligence, worthily matched with his.
It had been raining this morning while she was in his office, rain was running down the big window overlooking the smeary gray-washed city and overflowing a gutter splashily in some courtyard four stories below. The screen-saver on Tony’s computer was an underwater scene too, with little fishes and big sharks slipping in and out of the weeds. When he offered to telephone her with the title of a book he couldn’t find, she gave him her new number, told him she was separating from her partner. She had waited for the right moment so she could drop this information offhandedly and ironically, making herself and her life sound colorful and dangerous.
— Oh, he’d said in concern, and put down the pile of papers unheedingly onto an apple core on his desk. I’m sorry. Am I sorry? I don’t know why one feels obliged to say that. Maybe this is good news. Is it what you want?
He was quaintly disconcerted, as if he doubted his competence as an academic to make adequate responses to this lick of trouble from out of real life.
— What I want? she said. Isn’t that the oldest riddle? If we knew what women wanted.…
And she had laughed as if she had said something poignant and plucky and at the same time faintly suggestive.
Out on the road in the dark and the rain she was remembering this moment: the coziness of the underwater light in the little room; the open poetry books; the sense of their being marooned there together amid the waters, outside the world; the warm curl of possibility that a flirtation had begun, no more than that, nothing that needed to be thought through or faced, just a wriggle of pleasuring possibility that could swim in and out of stern realities irresponsibly as a fish. The memory seemed to her vivid yet remote, as if an aristocrat in a filthy torn shift on her way to the guillotine were to remember drinking chocolate out of fine porcelain among satin pillows: she thought of it not only with regret and incredulity but with accusation too. There might be some causal connection between the oblivious prodigal pleasures of that luxury and this punishment now.
* * *
A FEW MINUTES’ WALK farther on from where Clare sat in the road and wanted to give up, Coco found a gate and a rough track and a sign advertising BED AND BREAKFAST, 50 YARDS. The house must have been hidden behind trees in a little hollow; halfway along the stony track they could suddenly see all its lights: pink velvety light through drapes behind diamond-paned leaded windows, a carriage lamp beside a front door between clipped dwarf cypresses. It looked like a house people had retired to, not a working farm.
A man opened the door before they’d even reached it; he must have heard them coming and been mystified to hear children’s voices at such a time of night.
— I’m so sorry to bother you, called out Clare. She was astonished at how, out of near disintegration, it was possible to summon such a sensible-sounding, ringingly middle-class, confidence-inspiring self. Our car broke down. I was afraid to leave the children. My phone batteries were low. Could I possibly use your phone to call the AA?
He let them advance closer before he responded; wondering whether to shut the door on them and activate the alarms, Clare thought, in case they were part of some kind of trickery, the softening advance party of something sinister and criminal concealed in the bushes.
— How many of you are there?
— Just me and the three little ones.
— You’d better come in then.
— We’re so wet. I’m embarrassed to drip all over your floor.
— It’s all right. The porch is tiled.
They crowded into the tiny little entrance porch and both girls began to cry quietly, probably with relief at the light and warmth. The man shut the door rather hastily behind them. He was short with the springy slimness of someone who exercised; his face was tanned and crinkled, his hair was slicked back from a receding hairline, he was wearing check slippers. He smelled faintly of whisky, and there was jazz music — Glenn Miller? — playing in the house behind.