The dark furrows striating the iron-hard winter fields fanned out around her to the horizon. She had been here many times before. She knew them by heart. Their familiarity struck her just then as rather menacing, as if she had come to the end of something. Only yesterday, had she not demanded of her mother to know when it would be, this defining moment, this ‘in the end’ that everybody spoke of? Well, perhaps it was here. She knew this place. The connection crackled round her like an electric circuit, bleakly synchronising things. Perhaps she had no more time to start again. Perhaps she would not be saved. Indeed, there was an apocalypse at hand and it was perhaps no more than this: that she had been here before!
Her history welled up in her: things burned, frozen, buried alive, a whole disordered catalogue of stories told or hidden. She alone could make sense of them. She alone could tell it as it was, for who else would remember? She must begin! She would begin, with the seeds of a starting place planted here in her revisiting, to tell of the mysterious normality of things, of their unexceptional symmetry, of the uninterrupted rise and fall of days; of how one could wait, could waste as much time as there was between birth and burial waiting for things that never came!
The low plain of the darkening sky cupped over her like a giant hand, creased with clouds. She felt herself growing smaller before it, until finally she was tiny and the years had gone back and it was summer, and she was tasting once again the loveliness of unknowing, the certainty of belief, the delicious prospect of a future as yet untold. She had been in no hurry — she had had all the time in the world; and yet still she had thought then that it would be better than this. She raised herself on her knees and peered over the top of the tree. A sudden blast of icy wind slapped her cheeks. In dreams, she had perched in its withered breast as if at the prow of a ship: the wind coming off the fields into her hair, the sun nipplewarm and magnetic, the wheat a dragonfly ocean of swaying stalks over which they appeared to be sailing.
Chapter Twenty-three
AGNES came back from her parents’ house to a London cloaked with the promise of a storm. Although it was still early evening King’s Cross was deserted, as if a nuclear alert had sounded moments before her arrival. The air smelled oddly grassy and fresh. A strong wind whipped down the Gray’s Inn Road, causing litter to scuttle and fly along the pavements. Agnes got on the underground, scenting change.
When she got home, Nina was lounging around the house as if she lived there. By now the wind was bellowing through the empty streets and as Agnes entered the hall a sudden gust slammed the door ferociously shut behind her. Nina jumped up nervously from the sofa at the sound and Agnes saw her make a dash for the staircase. She herself, however, had had precisely that exigent means of escape in mind, and the two of them encountered one another at the foot of the stairs like embarrassed acquaintances caught in a chemist’s buying condoms.
‘I thought you were away,’ accused Nina.
‘I was,’ replied Agnes.
She surrendered the stairs by stepping back to allow her through. Nina nodded curtly and began to proceed up them. Agnes watched her legs disappearing from view, and for what seemed like the first time, felt a physical ache of regret for the sad demise of their friendship.
‘Nina!’ she called up the stairs. ‘Nina, can we talk? Please?’
There was silence on the upper floor. Agnes took comfort from the sound, deducing that if Nina had not exactly retracted her escape, she had at least suspended it in order to consider her offer. Presently, a long sigh was emitted from the top of the stairwell.
‘Okay.’ She began a suspicious descent. ‘If you want.’
Agnes remained frozen at the foot of the stairs while Nina proceeded sullenly past her. She had not expected, after making her initial overture, to be afforded the lion’s share of the work involved in drawing up some sort of armistice. She had assumed that her concession would immediately precipitate a warm and tearful reunion. Nina sat leadenly on the sofa and looked resentful. Agnes realised she had always been rather frightened of Nina, and this thought, combined with a sudden sensation of recklessness induced by the oddly comforting realisation that what was already lost could not be lost again, conspired to make her all at once quite brave.
‘Don’t do that!’ she cried, marching into the sitting-room.
‘What? Do what?’
‘Slouch around like a — like a teenager!’
She stood in front of her and glared down. Nina, who had been caught unawares by her attack, now attempted to marshal her forces.
‘Since when were you my mother?’ she said, folding her arms and pinching up her face in a manner which somehow managed to give more truth to Agnes’s accusation than she herself had been able to do.
‘There you go again! You sound about fourteen! It’s pathetic, it’s—’ Agnes felt weak with daring. She thought of sitting down, but decided her present stance afforded her a certain authority. ‘It’s beneath you,’ she continued masterfully. ‘We don’t have to talk, okay? We don’t have to do anything! We’re grown up, in case you hadn’t noticed, so don’t give me all that grudging aquiescence.’
Nina observed a brief, dumbfounded silence.
‘My mother would never say grudging acquiescence,’ she pointed out finally.
‘Your mother is a — a suburban android with furry seat covers on the loo!’
Nina considered this.
‘How do you know that?’ she said.
‘I don’t,’ Agnes confessed.
‘Well, actually, she doesn’t have furry seat covers,’ Nina said, quite amiably. ‘That kind of thing is class war in East Sheen. Frilly valances, now that’s another story.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Agnes replied, attempting to prolong this unexpected vein of good humour. ‘I underestimated her. What is a valance, anyway?’
‘Valance,’ said Nina, getting up, ‘is where old housewives go to die. Shall I make some coffee?’
Agnes wondered if she was asking for permission, and if so, whether this suggested a new and entirely unbargained-for respect.
‘I’ll help,’ she said, leaving nothing to chance.
The strain of politeness lent things a certain awkwardness. In the kitchen, Nina filled the kettle while Agnes got mugs out of the cupboard. In the course of their duties they almost collided with one another, and found themselves engaging in a quickstep of embarrassed avoidance like strangers on a pavement.
‘Sorry,’ they said in unison.
Agnes wondered if this understated apology were sufficient to encompass the full range of their transgressions.
‘How’s Jack?’ she nobly inquired, extending the hand of friendship still further. Nina visibly stiffened.
‘Jack and I aren’t seeing each other any more.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
‘What for? It wasn’t working. It was wrong. I was wrong,’ she added, plugging in the kettle.
She turned around to face Agnes, as if expecting her to speak. Agnes, taken by surprise, could only emit a stunned silence.