Occasionally, now that Syl had gone away (to lead — and waste — her own life, doing God-knows-what) Joseph went into his wife’s room in the evening, into her bed, but always left when she had gone to sleep. Celice required eight hours every night. She was making up for all the sleep she’d missed when she was young. Any less and she would be irascible all day. Joseph still only needed five or six hours, and he slept creakily, breathing like a dog, stretching, stumbling to the lavatory by moonlight four, five times a night. Sometimes he sat up wide awake at two or three o’clock, and read a further chapter of a book. He could never sleep if it was raining or if some merchant liner, idling in the fog, was sounding warnings on its horn. Once in a while he didn’t go to bed at all but stayed up with the bottle of Negrita gleewater he kept hidden on a kitchen shelf and a pack of cards, and listened to the radio on headphones. Lectures, news, debates. Not music, unless there was a recital of sentimental songs. He did not share his wife’s passion for the orchestra. Syl’s parents, her father and maman, were not compatible in bed or in the concert hall. Celice went to the concert hall and bed alone.
He must have hesitated, surely, when he stood and watched her sleeping, her ears still stuffed with cotton plugs, her eyes encrusted with the spongy detritus of sleep, her hair in tufts. She still looked tired. She was not yet the wife of his imagination, alert, sweet-smelling, crisply dressed, available. He knew she had no classes to teach on a Tuesday or a Wednesday and usually would choose to sleep till noon on her days off, happy to wake to an empty house, glad to have a spinster day. It was so tempting, though, to reach out and touch, or even to let drop his clothes and climb into the bed with her. But he was sensible, of course. He was a doctor of zoology and over fifty years of age. He knew he ought to let her sleep and tiptoe from the room. Perhaps he should drive off somewhere to enjoy the sun all on his own. She’d never know. She’d think he was at work as usual. He could do exactly what he wanted. That was — for a moment — his sun-fuelled fantasy. Go to a bar. Go to a show. Go to a prostitute — he’d like to pay for sex, just once, before he died. Sit out beneath the trees in Almanac Square while some young woman served him fish and vegetables, her body within reach. He could be foolish for a change. Be young for once.
Fat chance of that.
He coughed to wake her up, and to reawaken himself. He put her tea and breakfast on the bedside table. He placed her bookmark in her open book. He picked up a crumpled tissue and pushed it back beneath her pillow. He rescued her watch from the floor and laid it on the dressing-table — somewhere safe and visible where she would find it easily. Here was the splendid truth that so many men discover far too late, but he had known for years. He could be young and foolish only with his wife.
Joseph considered that it might be best to let her sleep till nine o’clock. She’d not complain at that. Or he could let the sunlight waken her, perhaps. He pulled the cord on the blinds so that they parted by a couple of centimetres. The streaming slats of sun, sliced into patterns by the blinds, spread across the cover of her bed in undulating bands. She did not wake, not even when he opened the blinds some centimetres more so that the light fell on her eyes. Her mouth dropped open and her wheezing nose was silenced, but still she slept.
Now he was anxious and impatient. Her tea would get cold. The weather would not last. Good fortune such as this is always fleeting. There would be clouds and mist ready to burst in on their day like spoiling boys. It was a waste (a phrase she hated) to let the day deteriorate while Celice slept. She would not thank him if he let her sleep through this.
Here was his plan. He should not be ashamed. They had some business on the coast. When they had read in the newspapers and seen in television reports that all the shorelands between the airport and Baritone Bay had been bought by a consortium of businessmen with plans for a holiday village and an estate of expensive houses their hearts had sunk. Here the rich would hide behind high walls and top their gates with barbed wire. The bankers and the businessmen would travel in and out, past guards, with the blinds down in their limousines. Think of the damage to the wildlife habitats, they said. The loss of beach and dunes.
But actually their discomfort was mostly at the loss of somewhere packed with memories, the good and bad. Celice feared the place, its chilling winds, its unremitting sea, its ever-smoky sky. Joseph had been there on several occasions during the marriage, though not recently. Not, in fact, for nineteen years. There’d been a period, though, when he was younger, when he’d got to know it well. Sometimes, when he’d had an afternoon to spare and no one knew, he’d drive out to the coast alone, self-consciously, as if he had a private rendezvous. He’d walk along the track with his binoculars, inspect the shore, but always end up in the dunes, remembering, reliving if he could, his seduction by Celice. That startling day. That once. Those transformations on the beach.
He’d always wanted to return with her. Of course. The first encounters are the best. ‘Let’s go out to the bay,’ he’d suggested a thousand times, ‘for old times’ sake. Before we die.’ But she had not agreed, not once. She didn’t even like to reminisce in too much detail about the week when she and Joseph had met, their lovemaking — because to think about that week was to remind herself of Festa and the fire, how passion could be murderous, how love could set the flame. She’d blamed herself for almost thirty years, no matter what Joseph had to say: ‘Be rational, forget the past’; ‘It’s my fault just as much as yours’; ‘A fire can start in hundreds of different ways.’ He made no difference. Celice hoped never to have to go back there again.
But once the plans for Salt Pines had been printed in the newspaper — and once she’d heard about the Academic Mentor’s suicide — never became too real a word for her. Up to that point she’d had the choice to stay away, but once Salt Pines was constructed with its protected gates the choice would be removed. Perhaps the time had come to take control of what she might be guilty of, and not be ruled by it. She said to Joseph, lightly, as she left for work one day so that he wouldn’t have the chance to lecture her, ‘Maybe we ought to go out there. I think we ought to go. Before they build.’ He knew she only meant that they ought to see the burnt remains of the study house, to put Festa’s ghost to rest before the bulldozers erased the place where she’d died. A resurrection in the dunes was not part of her plan.
But Joseph lent a sympathetic pair of ears, for once. Of course, she should return and face the past, he said, while she pulled on her coat. He’d been saying so for years. But when he pictured it — as he would a dozen times a day in the ensuing weeks — he did not visualize them standing on a blackened wall throwing flowers where once there’d been a long veranda and Festa sleeping. Instead, he placed himself and Celice, young and naked, in the dunes, her shocking fingers pulling at his clothes. This Tuesday, with its rare sunshine, would be the perfect opportunity to lead his wife down from the study house again to the hidden chambers of the shore. He’d have to be discreet, of course. Their only stated plan could be a return to the scorched remains. But then, when that was done, he could suggest a hunt for sprayhoppers, perhaps. And then a picnic. Somewhere with soft grass, private and protected from the wind.
He took her hand and squeezed the fingers. Waking her was making love to her. ‘Celice, it’s warm,’ he said. ‘Too good to waste. Are you awake? Celice. Let’s make the most of it.’ He knew better than to shake her. She would already be annoyed with him. This was her room. This was her day. If she was touched again or shaken, she had the right to pinch the thin flesh on his arm. She was a worshipper of sleep and orchestras.