The door opens.
‘Mr Bradshaw?’
A man comes in. He is wearing a suit. There is a silvery sheen on the cloth that makes him seem not entirely real. Howard is afraid. The unreality of this man — he is young, brown-haired, has a harmless face — suddenly terrifies him. The man shakes his hand. He is like a game-show host shaking the hand of the winning contestant. Howard knows that anything could happen, anything at all.
‘I’ve got the results of your biopsy here. There was a, ah, dark area on the right lung that was causing some concern, is that right?’
He frowns, wrinkles his brow. He scrutinises his notes.
‘That’s right,’ Howard says.
‘Well,’ the man says, ‘I have to say that I don’t quite see what all the fuss was about.’
‘Really?’ Howard says.
‘There’s obviously been a touch of pneumonia on that side, but that’s not the end of the world, is it?’
‘No,’ Howard says.
‘Is it?’ the man repeats, widening his eyes and laughing.
‘No,’ Howard says, laughing too.
‘It’s rather a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it is,’ Howard says.
‘Bed rest, yes,’ the man says, wagging his finger. ‘But a biopsy — whoa there!’
He slaps his knees and laughs again, and Howard laughs too, though he feels a certain consternation at what he has discovered here at the milled edge of life, the lunatics and incompetents in charge of the machinery.
‘Bed rest,’ he says, rising unsteadily from his chair. ‘That’s all?’
‘And plenty of fluids. Preferably non-alcoholic, Mr Bradshaw.’
‘Whoa there,’ Howard says weakly.
On the way home, he holds Claudia’s hand across the gearstick.
‘We could sue them, darling,’ he says. ‘That buffoon virtually handed it to me on a plate.’
‘What a good idea,’ Claudia says. ‘Shall we?’
He squeezes her fingers. He makes a vow, to be good.
XX
She is planting a hydrangea in the shady bed behind the house. It is morning. The village lies stunned in its newborn quiet. The grass is silvered with dew. The soil is black, and riddled with life.
Just after ten her husband comes out; she hears his feet approaching on the gravel. They stop an arm’s length away.
‘I’ll say goodbye now,’ he says.
She rises, pain in her knees. Her hands are caked in soil. He puts out his own clean hand, palm up like a policeman to stop her.
‘No need to get up. I can say goodbye here.’
But she is already up, as he can see. She chaffs her hands to get the dirt off. Even so he winces, in his brushed blazer and clean shirt.
‘Am I not allowed to touch you?’ she says, advancing on him so that he stiffens with discomfort. ‘You do look smart.’
‘Best not.’
‘But I want to touch you!’
He smiles coldly. The day stands around him, pale grey, windless. Suddenly she feels a loss of weight, of density; she is being abandoned. She is being sealed up, in a place where there can be no touching.
‘I’ll be back at five o’clock,’ he says. After all, he is only going to the Bridge Society annual lunch in Tunbridge Wells.
She puckers her lips and leans forward, her dirty hands clasped behind her back. She receives his dry kiss. She could never touch her mother’s clothes, nor her father’s. They kissed her thus, across the chasm of departure. There is darkness down there, fathomless. She knows she mustn’t fall in. But the scented, smart atmosphere of people who are leaving tempts her. She wants to hurl herself towards them, dirty fingers clutching and clawing at their clean pressed garments. Yet she knows the chasm is there.
‘Goodbye,’ she says.
‘Goodbye.’
He is gone: she kneels down again in the earth. She picks up her trowel and digs a hole, as she used to dig in her sandpit as a child. She watches her fingers moving in the soil. She is surprised to see that her hands are old. She digs a hole for the hydrangea, and plants it, and carefully beds it in.
*
A jackdaw has got into the greenhouse and broken two of the panes. She opens the door to let it out but it continues to fly in slow circles above her head, round and round, never alighting anywhere. She goes back to the house and returns with a blanket. The bird has destroyed a whole tray of seedlings. Her plants are lying on their sides in little spills of earth. She is afraid of birds, an old fear: her father, a bad shot, the birds never dead but denatured, roiling in the grass, mad with disorganisation. This one, so black, so evilly circling, is like something she herself has caused. Her fear roams out in the world, causative. It is the loss of identity that she fears. The jackdaw, circling in its captivity, is programmatic. She grips the blanket, and at the right moment she springs up and catches it in the folds, and clasps its hooded form in her arms. It struggles: its beak pecks and pecks at her arm through the wool. She goes out into the garden and releases it.
Thomas is there, standing on the lawn.
‘What are you doing?’ he says.
She is not certain he is real. She gazes at him, confused. Yet she is speaking.
‘Oh, you’re here — I wonder why I didn’t hear the car?’
He walks across the grass towards her. She had forgotten he was so old. She folds the blanket while he kisses her cheek.
‘I rang twice but you didn’t answer. I was late leaving the house.’
‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘You’re here now.’
‘I was worried you’d start moving the boxes without me.’
‘I haven’t touched them. I’ve been terribly sensible.’
She hears her own voice; what it says is perfectly true. She knows that she spoke to her son two days ago about the boxes. He offered to help her bring them down. This morning she cleared the upstairs landing to provide easier access to the attic. She does not doubt the reality of these things; it’s just that she hasn’t, in the strictest sense, experienced them. They have happened to someone she knows well, who is sometimes with her and sometimes not. She has always been aware of this being; even as a child she knew that someone lived in her, someone who wasn’t herself. But more and more often now, this person goes away. She has come to dread her departure, yet when it occurs she doesn’t notice that she’s gone. It is when she returns that the absence is made clear.
Thomas takes her arm and they walk around the herbaceous borders.
‘Look, the oak tree’s got a face,’ she says gaily, pointing.
It’s strange that she hasn’t noticed it before, a long face with a big chin and sad eyes. It looks like a monk’s face, in its cowl of bark. She knows most of the other faces in the garden. But this one she hasn’t seen before. It stares at her from its prison in the trunk.
‘So it has,’ Thomas says. He stops to examine it. He is always a little too eager, too responsive; when he was a child she wondered whether he might not be something of a simpleton. Her dogs were the same, quivering like compasses around her, so that her husband could never get them to do a thing. She notices that Thomas has put on weight. He has pouches under his chin. His hand is hurting her arm. There are red marks on the skin where the jackdaw pecked her. She shudders at the recollection of what she did. She makes a note to tell her father, though he is dead, and the world he lived in is dead too.