Mark was sobbing then, silently. And as the tears poured down his face he turned and put his lips close to my ear and he said, quite clearly, ‘All I want now is to be with her. Everything in this world is broken. Everything here in this world is wrong. It is not our home.’
I grasped his hand very tightly and I thought, then this is what I am here for. Here, to save him from this. To wed him to the earth. I had not yet thought of what might come next for me, after this cracking open of the ground beneath our feet, but it became clear to me that whatever happened, I could not leave him.
Mark tried to speak to Nicola after the funeral — went up to her, murmured a few words. She listened, stony-faced. He spoke a little more, gesticulating as he always did when he was nervous or unhappy. He reached for her hand. She pulled away, her face suddenly angry. Or perhaps simply desperate, for I saw tears starting in her eyes. She spoke a few words to him. He blinked and swallowed. She turned her back on him and walked towards the roadside, where Simon and the family were waiting.
Out of the massed ranks of the family, only one figure separated itself and walked towards us. It was Leo, awkward in his black suit. He must have been eleven or twelve by then? He had shot up like a leggy plant, tall and skinny, very unlike the little boy he had been. Mark flinched when he saw him. His hand went up to his forehead, to the little crescent-shaped scar half-hidden at his hairline.
Leo smiled. I think it was the first smile we’d seen that day.
He stuck out his hand and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mark, I’m so sorry,’ as though the whole thing had been his fault.
I think Mark barely even noticed who was speaking to him. He stared at Nicola until the car drove up and she was taken away from him as surely as if she had sunk to the bottom of the ocean.
Emmanuella came back to London with us, sitting in the back of the car with Mark while Jess and I shared the driving. Jess’s father had given Mark a sedative immediately after the funeral. He lolled on the back seat quietly, sometimes falling asleep, waking a little and then dozing off again.
We brought him into the flat and he sat on the sofa next to me, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. We did not talk a great deal. There was nothing to say. Mark was woozy, confused, his eyes focusing and defocusing.
After a little while I said, ‘Mark, we should get you to bed.’
And he leaned over and kissed me, hard, on the mouth, pushing his body into mine, rubbing his thumb at the nape of my neck. It was a lover’s kiss, not a friend’s or even an attempt at seduction. It was a kiss of intimacy. I jumped away, stood up, took a few paces back from the couch. I looked around the room. Emmanuella was smiling slightly, a confused smile as though she hadn’t quite understood a joke. Jess’s face was unreadable, quietly calm.
Mark smiled at me, wrinkling his nose. ‘C’mon then, lover. Let’s go to bed.’
Jess said, ‘Can I talk to you for a moment, James?’
I followed her out into the hall.
In the darkened passage I said, trying to bring a laugh into my voice, ‘I don’t know what that was about. It’s just, it must be Mark thinking that I’m … well, you know Mark.’
Jess nodded slowly. I barrelled on.
‘God knows what that cocktail of drugs has done to him. He’s so confused he doesn’t know where he is.’
Jess nodded again. She pursed her lips. I tried to say something else but she held up a hand.
She said, ‘He’s in pain, James. You should go to him. Be with him tonight.’
I didn’t understand. I said, ‘He’s confused. He doesn’t really want me. Maybe Emmanuella? Or you, maybe you could talk to him.’
An odd expression flickered across her face then — almost amusement, almost affection. I still think of that sometimes, trying, as always, to understand her. In her way, she was always more opaque to me than even Mark.
She said, ‘James. You should sleep in the spare bed with Mark tonight. You should be with him. He needs you.’
It’s a strange thing to say, but I think I loved her more in that moment than I’d ever done before, and I had loved her a great deal. It wasn’t gratitude, or guilt, simply a fleeting understanding of what she was, this short, slight woman standing in a darkened hallway, wearing jogging bottoms and an old jumper, with her hands on her hips and peeling eczema scars on her arms. I couldn’t think, then, why I’d ever wanted anyone but her, how she could ever have seemed nothing to me when, so clearly, she was everything.
‘Jess,’ I said, wanting to express all of these things.
She shook her head.
‘Not tonight. I’m tired. You’re tired. We can talk about it in the morning.’ She looked at me, her eyes unreadable. ‘It’s all right. I’m OK.’
And she turned and walked down the hall away from me.
SECTION 3. The Lessons
23
I don’t believe that Jess ever asked me to stay. A few days after the funeral, I went with Mark to arrange some matters in Dorblish and she did not object. After we returned to London, I stayed at his flat and she did not beg me to come home. The thing was settled before we had discussed it at all. I was reminded of the way we had become a couple, no fuss and no awkwardness. In the same way now our lives were unpicked without mess, simply and cleanly.
I tried to talk to her but she said, ‘He needs you more than I do.’
And I could not disagree with this. Over the spring, Mark began to heal physically — the scars on his arms faded, the cuts on his chest knitted together — but mentally he was worse than ever. There was no sign of improvement. He could not bear to be alone. He woke me repeatedly most nights, imagining monsters and spirits come to punish him.
And I? I remembered several things. I remembered how I had longed for Daisy to be washed away before she began. I remembered how Mark and I had argued the night she died. And I remembered, most of all, Mark. He is the thing I have never been able to loose myself from. And now, for the first time, he wanted me as I wanted him — to be always near me, always close, holding one another. I did not think then of the things I have subsequently come to consider. I knew that I loved him and I knew that, at last, he needed me.
Can I confess this too? It is the worst thing yet, in my litany. It is the thing of which I am most ashamed and which has made me learn the lesson that Mark has always known: that we are not, in essence, good. It is this: I was pleased. Not that Daisy was gone, not that. But pleased because at last Mark needed me. At last, I was not to be thrown away or beckoned with a gesture. I had wanted this; there was a triumph to it. My love had never been enough without his pain.
There was a moment, I think, a teetering point when I doubted what I should do. It was just at the end of the school holidays. I was due to return to the school where I worked. I explained this to Mark and he frowned at me, puzzled.
‘I don’t understand.’ He shook his head. ‘Just tell them you won’t be coming back. I can pay for a supply teacher or whatever.’
It had occurred to me, but only dimly, that such things were possible. Mark took it for granted that I would not work now. He gave me signing power for one of his accounts. I looked at the sum of money sitting in the current account and was astonished.
‘There’s enough here to buy a house, Mark. A couple of houses. It should be somewhere it can earn interest.’
He shrugged.
‘I think that is interest. From something else. I’m not sure. There’s a man in the City who deals with it. You can talk to him if you like.’