The smell of old Mrs Evans grew too strong, she had to go outside. She didn’t put on her coat. Not going outside without a coat is for healthy people who are afraid of catching a cold, she thought. She stopped under the rose arch and stared at how the new slate path came to a dead end on the lawn. It wasn’t right. It needed something at the end. The path had to lead somewhere, to a pillar maybe, with a big pot on it. The stream murmured, the fallen oak lay dead still. She couldn’t imagine the alders ever budding again; there seemed to be no life left in the stumps at all. She went round the side of the house. The geese were tearing at the grass. Still four of them. She wondered if foxes hibernated too. Asleep in a den with a bulging stomach, its snout between its paws, sighing now and then with contentment? She pressed her palms against her temples because she noticed that she was measuring her thoughts in rhythmic syllables, and changed the ‘contentment’ in her last thought to ‘satisfaction’. There was no wind, not a breath of it. The geese saw her and started to cluck softly. She leant on the thick wall. Do they think I’m a goose too, just like the dog thought I was a dog, according to the boy? No, I look more like a turkey, she thought, tugging on the tassels of the purple hat.
A few minutes later she was back at the kitchen table. Instead of returning to what she’d written, she leafed through the section titled NATURE. After a while — she’d almost finished the section — the letters started to run together, making it more and more difficult to read. She didn’t find the words ‘goose’ or ‘geese’ anywhere. Just as she’d thought. It was all ‘bees’ and ‘butterflies’ and ‘robins’. She sniffed, clapped the book shut and pushed it away. Dragged herself upstairs, pressed a tablet out of the strip, went back downstairs and poured herself a glass of white wine. Taking the tablet with the wine. When she heard footsteps on the slate, everything was pleasantly fuzzy again.
*
He’d bring the bread in, then they might talk about the shopping list, then he’d leave again. She would order him to leave. As if he were a dog. He would go to buy superfluous things. Afterwards, possibly after a second tablet, she would get ready. Taking bread and wine to the old pigsty, cushions and rugs, trimming the end of a candle with a sharp knife so it would fit in the neck of an empty bottle, a box of matches next to it. Tonight he could lie next to her, his head lower than hers, his broad thumbs on her breasts. If he dared, at least.
Bradwen came in. He put his rucksack on the table and took off his hat. ‘They said hello back,’ he said. ‘The baker’s wife asked when you’d be coming again yourself.’
She shook her head.
‘You on the wine?’
‘One glass.’
‘She’s in a reading club. She said it would be nice if you’d join.’
‘A reading club?’
‘Yes. She even told me the title of the book she’s reading now.’
She looked at him. His hair was stuck to his forehead and, as usual, he didn’t run his fingers through it. The grey eyes, the squint that made it so hard to see what he was thinking and feeling. He was different, really different, without the dog. It’s his own fault, she thought. I sent him away several times. Water suddenly occurred to her. There has to be water too, wine by itself isn’t enough. While she was adding it to the shopping list on the kitchen table, she tried to picture the faces of Rhys Jones and his estate agent friend. Not the stony expression of the former, seven or so days ago, or the supposedly jovial look of the latter, a few months ago, but their surprised faces about a week from now. She only half succeeded, she had no recollection of the estate agent’s features at all. She tapped a cigarette out of the packet and lit it with a match. Without thinking she drew on it hard and didn’t know what hit her: it was so horrible that she didn’t take the time to use her fingers but just spat it out. It landed on one of the sheets of paper she had written on. When the boy noticed that she was going to leave it there, he picked it up for her and pressed down on the smouldering paper with one thumb. Then he walked over to the sink and held the cigarette under the tap before throwing it in the bin.
‘Did Mrs Evans smoke?’ she asked, after she’d taken a mouthful of wine and had to swallow again emphatically to keep down the rising nausea.
‘No.’ The boy stayed near the sink.
‘You have to go and do the shopping.’
‘You coming?’
‘No. I’ve got things to do.’
He gestured at the table. ‘Were you working?’
‘You could just go away for good,’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean what I say.’
‘You don’t give up, do you?’
She wanted to look straight into his eyes, but couldn’t because the window, the light, was behind him. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ she said.
He stood there with his bum against the sink, then started taking the bread out of his rucksack. ‘I miss Sam,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
She sniffed. Despite the lack of wind, her excursion outdoors had dispelled the old-woman smell, but now it was rising again from her clothes, drifting up from her shoulders. ‘Get going,’ she said.
He picked up the shopping list. ‘Why do I have to buy so much water?’ he asked.
‘I’m starting to get sick of the tap water,’ she said.
‘Have you got some money for me?’ he asked.
56
The ferry’s departure was delayed. There was a problem with one of the propellers. They announced over the PA that divers had been sent down to fix it, without specifying exactly what the problem was. The husband and the policeman drank a second whisky. It was busy on the boat. Fake Christmas trees everywhere, fairy lights, boisterous Brits and quiet Dutchies. Someone was up on a small stage entertaining people. They were sitting off to one side at a round table that was bolted to the floor, next to a window that had rainwater trickling across it on the outside. Through the window they could look out over an enormous expanse of brightly lit petrochemical industry. Somewhere far below them was the policeman’s car, among hundreds of other cars. Christmas Eve. Force 5 to 6 winds, north-westerly.
‘We won’t arrive at nine in the morning then,’ the husband said.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ the policeman said. ‘We’re not in a hurry, are we?’
‘No.’ He sipped his whisky: the policeman had got both rounds at the bar, which was decorated with lots of brass. ‘A fine Scotch,’ he’d said, ‘single malt.’ It tasted smoky, peaty. The policeman knew what he was talking about; the husband hardly ever drank spirits. Now that he was sitting here, he remembered a crossing he’d made long ago with a friend from high school. They drank gin and tonics because they were travelling to England. The friend had spent the whole night puking into the shared toilet in the corridor; he had warded off the nausea by rubbing his breastbone for hours, lying motionless on his back on a narrow bed in a windowless cabin with two complete strangers in the next bunk. That was before he knew his wife. Now he knew her and now he was drinking whisky, a drink for grown men, he thought, but equally good, or even better, as a way of getting in the mood for England. Packed in his travel bag, dozens of metres lower in the boat, was a marble cake his mother-in-law had made. That was a tradition: when they went on holiday, she produced a marble cake for them to eat at their destination, whether it was a campsite or a hotel room. As if this were an ordinary holiday, as if she hadn’t noticed that her son-in-law was going away with the policeman, not her daughter. He looked at the man on the chair next to him. He had just taken a sip of whisky and was watching the entertainer put a hat on a redhead he’d hauled up onto the stage; he let the whisky wash around his mouth before swallowing it. Even out of uniform he looked like a policeman. Maybe because he knew what he looked like in uniform.