Whenever Ruth glances at Lewis’s garden, he holds his breath, wondering what’s coming, what will have to go.
She washes out the cups and then stands in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a tea towel while she tells him about the course she is thinking of taking. ‘I am going to do one this year,’ she says. For years, she has been planning on doing a degree, trying to decide on one: French, with German or Italian or Spanish, with a year abroad, perhaps in Paris; or French with Chinese, a year in China; or French with European Studies or Global Studies or Philosophy, or Modern Languages with History of Art. Now that she has the boy she has been looking into evening classes instead, languages without the year abroad. She goes back into the kitchen to hang the damp tea towel over the cold radiator.
‘What about the boy?’ calls Lewis. ‘I can look after him.’
‘John will look after him,’ she says.
Yes, thinks Lewis, John will look after him. John is a good man, a good father, and hospitable to Lewis, even though Lewis cannot bear, now, to be in a room with him.
Lewis has sometimes thought about retaking his maths A level, in which he had got such a disappointing grade. He does not know where his old textbooks are though. He does not want to have to buy them all over again. He says to Ruth, ‘Do you know where my old maths books are?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘What maths books? You don’t mean your old school books? What do you want them for? It’s all done differently now, you know. Everything’s changed since your day.’ She wanders over to the bookshelves. ‘You’re always losing your books.’
He has only recently noticed just how many Bliss Tempest novels Edie managed to accumulate. They were just about all she read, and she read them repeatedly. She read them in bed; he would switch off his lamp and she would still be reading. There was always one on her bedside table. He has been finding them all over the house, in fact. He has been collecting them up and putting them back onto his wife’s shelf in the living room. She probably has the writer’s entire oeuvre. Some of them, she once told him, were out of print and could only be got from second-hand bookshops or private collectors. ‘They might be worth something one day,’ she said. The men in them always reminded her of Lewis. She mentioned this to him and he was amused to imagine himself as a character in a romance because he did not think of himself as a romantic man. He himself has never read these well-thumbed books of Edie’s. His books are on the shelves above — his literature, along with his father’s, the bibles and reference books.
Despite his efforts, though, despite the returning of all these books to the shelves, there are still gaps where there should not be gaps, spaces at which he stares, wondering what is missing, becoming anxious about books that might have been borrowed and might never be returned.
Edie used to drive the mobile library to the villages, scattering books, it seemed to Lewis, far and wide, driving off leaving them strewn, like the books she sometimes left behind in hotel rooms or on the roof of their car as they drove away. She claimed not to do this, but she did; the books went missing.
Lewis remembers how the library tipped very slightly towards you as you entered, when you put your weight on the steps, and how it swayed underfoot while you were browsing. In the mobile library, the librarian still stamps the book’s paper insert, printing the date in black or purple ink, just like in real libraries in the sixties. In the town library now, you don’t take your books to the lady behind the desk, you put your books into an opening in a big, black machine that scans them. You can leave without speaking to a soul.
When Edie retired, she missed driving the mobile library, doing her rounds, seeing the countryside, and so Lewis, who had not been to the smaller villages for a very long time, drove her out there. He remembers pointing out some cows he saw galloping across a field. ‘Cows don’t gallop,’ said Edie, who had not noticed them. But Lewis had seen them; he had seen them galloping through the thick grass. He loved driving through the countryside and the villages, slowing for horses, pausing to admire some particularly attractive cottage, coming to a stop outside the only house in a terrace that was not plastered and painted or clad, its bare bricks giving it an exposed and vulnerable appearance. Later, he went back on his own, although he found the drive lonely without Edie. Coming to a stop outside that unclad house, he sat gazing towards it, his engine idling. He eyed the fine yellow car parked in the street at the front, and peered down the side of the house towards the back door, which was ajar. He saw the grey head of a man bent forward in the garden, working his way along the borders. He could not see the man’s face. Lewis wound down his window, his engine still running. The man, slowly standing, a few dead plants hanging from his hands, looked out towards the street and, through narrowed eyes, saw Lewis. ‘He isn’t here,’ shouted the man. Or he would see Lewis from the front window and come to the front door to shout across the road, ‘He isn’t here. He doesn’t live here.’
Lewis no longer drives. Ruth is relieved. She always expected something to happen to him. She gave him a mobile phone, just in case he got into trouble, but he never needed to use it. He drove for more than fifty years without having an accident, except for one incident in a rental car. He took it back expecting to have a row, to have to pay through the nose. It would be on the bank statement, he thought, for Edie to see and query. He would have to admit to carelessness, dangerous driving, reckless behaviour. The man at the rental company did not raise an eyebrow though. He said it was nothing, just a scratch, and did not even charge him; he just let him walk away. In the end, Lewis stopped driving because of his painful knee. He keeps the mobile phone in a drawer in the kitchen.
‘I doubt you realise what you’ve lost anyway,’ says Ruth, looking at his bookshelves. ‘You never remember what you’ve read.’
It is true. There are books he’s had for decades that he thought he’d never got round to opening, and then when he did finally read them, he remembered, as he neared the end, that he had in fact read this before; or he found his own pencilled notes in the margins, perhaps a hundred pages in.
‘I’ve put some soup in the fridge for your tea,’ says Ruth. ‘Are you going to get dressed? Maybe go out and get some fresh air later? You haven’t been out of the house all week.’
‘I’ve been to the bin,’ says Lewis. (He stood at his boundary, with one hand on the lid of his wheely bin. It has the number of his house painted on it, so that it will not get lost. The zero is a foot across. He watched a plane go overhead.)
Ruth is in the hallway now, putting on her coat before coming back for a kiss. He never knows what part of him she’s aiming for. She kisses the edge of his ear, his hair. ‘I’m off now,’ she says.
‘All right,’ he says.
She has to slam the door behind her because it won’t close properly otherwise. When Lewis hears the bang, the rattle of the letterbox, he stands and makes his way to the front room. He watches through the window, through the net curtain, as she walks to the gate. When he sees that her car is parked out there, he is surprised. Her house is only down the road and the office where she works is just a bit further on. She always walks; she never does the journey by car.
Getting in behind the wheel, she puts her soup bag down on the passenger seat, straps herself in and drives away without looking back at the house. She keeps Susan Boyle in the CD player. She likes ‘I Dreamed a Dream’. She sings along.