‘I felt it,’ he said.
Waking from a nap, he had somehow known that, at that moment, the woman he had always loved had ceased to breathe. The knowledge reached him with such force that he had jackknifed into an upright position, his heart beating so fast, so loudly, that he imagined he heard footsteps in the street below, a heavy person running.
I asked him if anything like that had ever happened before.
He shook his head. ‘No.’
He didn’t think to question the information, though. For him, it had the incontrovertible power of a divine message or an oracle. It couldn’t be verified, neither could it be disproved. Later, I saw that his behaviour had a distinct emotional logic to it. In sensing his wife’s death, he had reclaimed her as his own.
Not that it was much comfort to him. He locked himself into his room and refused to come out. I would hear him weeping at all hours of the day and night. He wouldn’t eat the meals I prepared for him. He even stopped listening to the radio. And Marie couldn’t help. She had troubles of her own.
She had moved back into the house on Hope Street only a few days before. While working for a law firm in the capital, she had fallen in love with one of the senior partners, a married man more than twice her age. She became pregnant by him, but subsequently lost the child. Not long afterwards, he embarked on an affair with his new secretary. Marie resigned. One Sunday morning she appeared on the doorstep with a suitcase, her complexion pale, almost soggy, her hair oddly lacklustre. I remember how frail she felt when I hugged her, as if all the spring and verve, all the resilience, had gone out of her. Less than a week later, Victor woke from his afternoon nap and the period of grieving began.
Marie took a job at the local supermarket — the same shop, ironically, where we had once been mistaken for lovers. She wore a pink-and-white-striped uniform, her name printed on a plastic badge pinned over her left breast, and she dyed her hair a flagrant chestnut-bronze that made her look anaemic. She showed no interest in men — or, if she did, she allowed them to treat her like something off the supermarket shelf: they consumed her, then disposed of her. Once, I walked through the front door after a morning at the library to find a stranger coming down the stairs buttoning his jacket and smiling plumply as though, like a squirrel, he had nuts stored in his cheeks. He muttered a few words as he edged past, his forehead damp all of a sudden. Perhaps he thought I was the husband. Marie appeared above me in the hallway, her dyed hair hiding half her face. She was wearing a bra and pants that didn’t match. And Victor in his bedroom the whole time, behind that locked door of his, oblivious …
Usually, when I came home, Marie would be sprawled in front of the TV. She wouldn’t acknowledge me at all, not even a hello. Every now and then, she would imitate the sound a cash-till makes when it scans a bar-code, that monotonous beep, then she would direct a sickly grin at the sofa or the wall, but that was the most anyone got out of her. Everything about our lives was askew, off kilter. We were all adrift in that small house, with no notion of how to steer a course.
I remember going into her room one evening to tell her that supper was ready. She was lying on her bed, one arm behind her head, a neat round bone showing on the inside of her elbow. Her uniform had ridden up so I could see her bare legs, right up to where her knickers started. I knelt by the bed and put a hand on her thigh, my heart beating so hard that a black mark pulsed in the air between us.
She watched me for a moment across her breasts, her eyes unlit, her breathing audible, almost abrasive, then she sat up fast and pushed me in the chest with the heel of her hand. I fell backwards, hitting my head on her cupboard door. She left the bed and walked past me, out of the room. I heard her footsteps, slow and deliberate, as she made her way downstairs, and then the pinched hiss as she turned the TV on.
In October, I travelled north to take my place at university. There was a part of me that worried about how Victor and Marie would cope in my absence. At the same time, I couldn’t deny the feeling of relief that came over me as I walked out of the house. Grief ran down its walls like condensation, and the silence that lay in all the rooms had become so profound, so treacherous, that I feared I might sink into it, as one might sink into a marsh, never to be seen again. During the previous few weeks I had been aware that either Victor or Marie — or even, possibly, both of them — could be removed from the Red Quarter at any moment. In retrospect, it seems astonishing that they were not. We were just lucky, I suppose. Still, I was always waiting for that unfamiliar and yet predictable knock on the front door. As for Victor and Marie, I doubt they would have cared. Though they had followed different paths, they had both reached a state of mind where they didn’t believe that things could get any worse.
When I returned to Hope Street for the Christmas holidays, the house seemed poky and ramshackle, but perhaps it suffered by comparison with the university I now attended, a typically sanguine confection of marble, steel and glass. Victor had celebrated his sixty-second birthday in November, and he had decided to take early retirement. Though he no longer locked himself behind his bedroom door, he rarely left the premises, preferring to drift from room to room in his frayed silk dressing-gown, his feet in a pair of leather slippers, the backs of which were trodden flat. The bones showed in his forearms, and his neck had withered to such an extent that I didn’t understand how it could support that enormous imposing head of his. His thoughts seemed firmly rooted in the past, as if compensating for the degree to which he had aged. The book of shoes was never far away.
Like Victor, Marie had undergone a physical transformation. She had dyed her hair black again, and it curved beneath her chin in the old way, but she was more restrained than she used to be, almost as though she had been stricken by a fever that had left her permanently depleted. She didn’t appear to have any desires or ambitions. Instead, she seemed content simply to stay at home and keep her father company. She was working at the town hall, as a clerk. She was still so young, only twenty-seven. Did she miss that wealthy lawyer? Was she in mourning for the child she had lost? I had no sense of what she might be thinking or feeling. If anything, the months that had elapsed since we had last seen each other had added to our awkwardness, and I found it difficult to know what to say to her. Everything I thought of was either too weighty or too superficial. I knew that we would never again swing hand in hand through the shopping precinct or fall about laughing at the supermarket check-out. The electricity that had crackled in the air between us, the flirtation that had meant so much to me, the love that had lit up my entire life — it was gone, all gone, and it would not return. Night after night, in my small box of a room, I would lie on my back with my arms folded across my chest and I would listen to the wind picking at a loose flap of tar-paper on the roof where she used to sunbathe. Tears would rise to the surface of my eyes and overflow. My cheeks would sting. A spring had welled up inside me, its waters irrepressible, but bitter, acidic.
In April I went home again, but only for a week this time. On the last night, as we ate our supper at the kitchen table, Victor announced that they were thinking of selling the house. The atmosphere in the room seemed to solidify around me. I couldn’t even lift my knife and fork.
‘You wouldn’t mind, would you?’ Victor said.
‘Mind?’ I cleared my throat. ‘Why do you want to sell the house?’
Victor looked away across the room. ‘Too many memories.’
Though Marie didn’t lift her eyes from her plate, something came through the air from her. She was silently agreeing with her father. Yes, too many memories.