‘Some women,’ said Gloria, ‘don’t appreciate what they’ve got.’
Futh, stoking the still-raging fire, said quietly to himself, ‘And some people don’t know what’s theirs and what’s not.’
He did not hear his father moving from the table and crossing the room. He only knew someone was standing behind him when he was pulled up by his collar, turned around and smacked. He dropped the poker and it fell at his feet, its red-hot tip singeing the carpet. His father returned to the table. Futh picked up the poker, put it back where it belonged, followed his father back to the table and sat down.
They pulled their crackers and put on their paper hats. Gloria got a paste necklace in her cracker and wore that too, and they listened to the Christmas service on the radio.
After lunch, a rug was moved from another part of the room and placed in front of the hearth, covering the scorch mark made by the poker. ‘There you are, you’d never know,’ said Gloria, turning back the corner of the rug with her foot to take another look at the blackened carpet, poking at it with her bare toe.
His hangover is getting worse. Futh, drinking more water, wishes that he had thought to pack aspirin. He thinks about showering but just gets dressed instead, putting the lighthouse in his pocket and applying new plasters to his messed-up heels before pulling on his thick walking socks and, steeling himself, his boots. Then, zipping up his honeymoon suitcase and leaving it by the door ready for transfer, he sets off.
He walks two miles just looking for an open bakery. It is almost midday before he begins the day’s hiking.
His route takes him across cornfields and then into forest. It is late August, almost autumn, harvest time, but for now the leaves are still green and there are blackberries on the bushes. The undergrowth is busy with mice and lizards and the air is full of darting insects nipping at him.
There are rain clouds gathering and the darkening sky and the forest canopy make it feel like dusk even in the early afternoon. Here and there, he emerges into daylight, coming to viewpoints overlooking the Rhine. It is possible to see a long way, to see miles of river and railway track, boats and trains on their way to Koblenz or Bonn, or further, to Cologne or Düsseldorf, or further still towards Rotterdam and Utrecht and the North Sea. But he is not looking, is unable to think of anything except how much his feet hurt.
When he rests, he feels his feet throbbing inside his boots. He knows that his plasters have come away, but if he takes off his boots he does not think he will ever put them back on. He continues on his way, the path returning him to the gloomy forest.
He walks ever more slowly as the afternoon wears on. The path seems never-ending but the viewpoints have tailed off. In the fading light, Futh, with everything but a torch in his backpack, begins to feel that the path might now be taking him deeper and deeper into the forest and that he might never find his way out. He could believe that the trees themselves were, in the darkness, shifting and spreading around him, to enclose him, to keep him there. He can barely see where he is treading, cannot tell what it is that his boots sink into here or what cracks beneath them there. At one point, he stops and considers turning back, remembering something he has read about deep-sea divers getting confused about which way is up, thinking that they are surfacing even as they dive deeper. But he ploughs on, and finally the trees thin out and he emerges from the forest into the twilight, returning to civilisation, and the streetlights are coming on to light his way.
He has passed the midpoint of his circular walk, has walked more miles than he has left to go. He will be back at his starting point, back in Hellhaus, by the end of the week, and every step now takes him closer.
He abandons the rest of the day’s hiking. Finding his way to the station, he catches a train to his next overnight stop, resting his miserable feet and leaning his head on the rattling window against which the rain has begun to fall.
‘There were still shipwrecks,’ his father said, ‘after the lighthouse was built.’
Futh’s mother was sunbathing in a bikini top and shorts. She had taken off her walking boots and socks and stretched out her bare feet, but Futh still had his on. His father was wearing ordinary shoes and ruining them.
His mother liked to walk and Futh liked to go with her. There were hills where they lived, where the houses ended. You left the shop on the corner with your quarter pound of sweets in a paper bag and walked across a field and there you were, going up into the hills. The hills skirted the town. It was possible to walk for miles along the top without losing sight of their house, although his mother always kept walking until she did, humming tunes which were lost to the wind. His father never came, and his mother no longer asked him.
Up on the cliffs in Cornwall, his father was talking about wrecking and plundering, and telling some story about a ghost ship crashing over and over again into the rocks around the lighthouse, and Futh saw his mother rolling her eyes. He had seen this before, his mother fidgeting while his father held forth. This was how it always began, with his father going on in this manner and his mother rolling her eyes and twitching and sighing like some creature stirring. If, after some time, his father was still talking, his mother would begin with her provocative interjections. ‘Nobody’s listening,’ she would say, or, ‘Nobody cares.’ And then perhaps there would be silence, or perhaps his father’s temper would flare — he lost his temper easily but it was all over just as quickly.
She gave a great sigh. His father was oblivious. ‘The light,’ he said, ‘flashes every three seconds and can be seen from thirty miles away. In fog, the foghorn is used.’
Futh wandered off, as if there might be somewhere to escape to. He had in his hand the perfume, the silver lighthouse, which he had taken out of his mother’s handbag. Returning after a short while with the glass vial out of its silver case, he found his father still talking about foghorns, or perhaps he had been waiting and was just picking up where he had left off, and his mother said without opening her eyes, ‘Do you know how much you bore me?’
Futh watched his father silently placing the remains of the picnic in the cool box, packing the plastic plates and beakers into the rucksack, putting the lid on the Thermos of cold coffee and shaking off the picnic blanket on which only he had been sitting, a breeze getting up as he tried to fold it. Finally, with everything packed away, his father stood still. He looked at his wife lying in the grass with the sun on her, and Futh watched the gulls. He watched them until his mother, standing, said, ‘I’m going home,’ and then, looking down, he saw his hand and the blood where he was cut, the little bottle broken, his mother’s perfume in his wound.
The same afternoon, they collected their luggage from the caravan site and took the train back from Cornwall. His mother changed in the toilets, swapping her sun clothes for travelling clothes and putting on shoes with heels, slipping them off again as soon as she sat down.
When the train was moving, his father went to the buffet car and did not return until they were almost home. His mother fell asleep with her bare feet on the grubby floor, her short, pale-blond hair resting against the dirty window. The perfume case, containing the broken glass vial, was in Futh’s pocket. She might have known he had it, but did not ask for it back. His unwashed hands and his boots smelt strongly of violets. His mother smelt of the leftover orange she had eaten in the carriage before falling asleep. Years later, when Futh worked in the manufacturing of artificial odours, the smell of octyl acetate would make him feel sad.
He knew, sitting there on the rushing train, that his mother was leaving them. He knew that when the train reached their station, the holiday would be over and then she would go. He wanted the train to slow down; he wanted it never to stop. He wanted his mother to keep on sleeping, his father to stay in the bar. But the train sped on and the daylight went and through the windows, in the dark, Futh glimpsed the names of the stations they were hurrying through and he knew that they were almost home. His father returned from the bar, and the noise he made coming into the carriage looking for his seat woke Futh’s mother, and the train slowed, and trundled to a stop.