Dan gets up. He can’t lie in bed any more. There’s a suggestion of light to the room, but not dawn, not yet. Only a grainy greyness throughout the house as he takes the stairs, makes his way to the kitchen, tells himself he’s heading for the kettle. But then he’s reaching for the cupboard handle and peeling back the packaging, and crouching over that black and white photograph.
Ridiculous – he thinks, and he feels shame again, seeing himself as if from the other side of the room, in his boxer shorts, huddled over somebody’s bought and sold skin. He’s become the man he never wanted to be. How he hated those people, empty of love, who cooed over the Six. Who wanted to touch them.
He puts his finger to the hole in the glass.
So soft, so vague. A gentle emotion. She was a good person. Could that be true? He wonders. He can’t tell what part of his assumptions come from the skin and what comes from the things he thinks he knows about her from what his grandfather used to say. The Nation’s Songstress. Some people are better at reading skins than others. He suspects he has no talent for it.
He searches for the source of her love again. The love is sweet and delicate, like a thread. But still there’s no face, no image. Nobody to blame for that emotion, and no pain. There’s never any pain in a skin, which means that all skins are, in fact, a lie.
The shame overcomes the curiosity, and he takes his finger away.
His instinct is to destroy the skin so that nobody else can touch it. He thinks of his own skin from the Stuck Six days, preserved and folded in the British museum. Maybe visitors touch that, and want to rub it out, burn it up. Other people’s love is so precious that it must pain the rest.
Dan turns over the frame and looks for a way to open it, but it’s glued together. He could break the glass. He thinks of Liam, sleeping. There’s no way to break it quietly, and he doesn’t want to explain the act.
Besides, who is he to destroy it?
He sits back on the cold floor, clutching the picture. The weak, grey light strengthens into day, and eventually Dan gets up, puts the frame back in its packaging, and takes it to his bedroom. He slides it under the bed, among the few possessions that the others left behind when they moved out, one by one.
When he walks in the house he knows she’s there, although he couldn’t say why. It’s in the warmth of the kitchen, perhaps. The romantic in him would say it’s because she’s passed through it, leaving a trace of her vividness behind. But when he walks into the living room it’s not Nicky he finds there but Sunetra, sitting on the sofa with her long dress pulled over her knees as she taps on her phone. She looks up and gives him a huge smile that lasts for no longer than a second. Then she says, ‘I have to get this down,’ and returns her attention to her phone.
He was so certain it was Nicky.
He stands in the doorway and watches her. It’s as if she’s given him permission to stare, with her determination to put her own attention elsewhere, so he drinks her in without feeling the need to hide it. She is unchanged, and utterly different. How can she be both? He notes all this dispassionately. There is a hole within him for her, but it doesn’t scare or repulse him. The feeling has gone, that’s all. She drops the phone back in her purse, then unfolds from the sofa and stands, to faces him directly.
‘Hello,’ Sunetra says.
He’d forgotten how tall she is.
‘You found the key, then.’
‘I’m still weirdly proud of that pot,’ she says.
‘You can take it with you,’ he says, and she frowns, and he regrets his choice of words. He never meant to suggest it was not important to him, even though it’s only a pot.
She tells him, ‘I like the fact that it stays here.’
‘I do too.’
She comes to him, and they hug. She puts a hand to his cheek and feels his skin. So personal an act. ‘You poor thing,’ she says, and he remembers how she always could read him; how could he have persuaded himself that Sunetra didn’t know him, deep down? She breaks the contact and says, ‘I’m not staying. I just had the urge to see the house.’
‘Just the house, then? Not me?’
She doesn’t reply to that, directly. She purses her lips, then says, ‘Did you see the photo of Mik, in the paper?’
‘He’s looking good.’
‘He always did.’
‘It’ll desert him at some point. Do you want a drink? Some dinner?’
‘Let’s get Chinese from that place in Shefford that does great chow mein. Did great chow mein.’
‘It still does. Not everything is different around here, you know.’
She laughs. ‘Of course it isn’t,’ she says. Oh, this is good, this is familiar and strong and they can stand each other, they can be more than old lovers, they can be friends, and the Chinese food isn’t delivered for an hour so they’ve confided nearly everything by the time they get to eat. He tells her about the phone call with Howard, and the emergency leak he fixed in a bathroom this morning where the woman recognised him and said she cried when the Six broke up and, maybe he could fix that leak for her too with a bit of personal attention. Was that a come-on? Yes, says Sunetra, and a rubbish one at that. She holds him in her eyes, with her interest.
Her turn: she talks of the poems she’s writing now, poems about loss and good grace and kindness. ‘They all seem to be full of you,’ she says, slowly, a puzzled revelation.
‘You think I’m kind?’
‘You always are to me.’
That brings guilt, for the cruelty she doesn’t know about. He hates her poems, particularly that famous one, in which he found only sentimentality; he’s said as much to Howard and the others a number of times. And even earlier, when they were all still in love, they would laugh at her efforts to be creative. That pot, outside the door, slowly sinking into the wet mud of the garden.
‘I wrote a new poem today,’ she says, ‘while waiting for you to get back. Do you want to hear it?
He hesitates.
‘No, of course you don’t, it’s fine, it’s fine,’ she says. She finishes the last of the chow mein.
‘It’s not that I—’
‘You lived it. You don’t need the poems. So where’s this Liam I keep hearing about? Howard talks to me too. He thinks you’re protesting too much.’
‘It’s not – listen, he’s taken his kids to a theme park. They’re staying over at the hotel there. But he’s not, we’re not…’
‘That’s a shame. I wanted to see this man you’re so busy not loving. Right. Well. I’ll get going.’
‘It’s late. Stay over.’
But she’s already up, and fetching her coat from the living room. His hesitation was unforgiveable, of course.
What did she want from tonight? He knows, suddenly, what he wants from her. He wants to show her the picture of Edith Learner, and have her touch that old skin. He wants to know what she thinks of it, and of him for owning it.
‘You know,’ Sunetra says. ‘I loved Liz first, and I loved Howard because it became clear that he was part of Liz. You I loved because you were so obviously the end of us all. You were our completion, and our end.’ She nods. He can tell she’s pleased with the way she’s phrased the thought. She’s making a mental note to write it down later, and package it up as a poem.
They wait for the taxi to arrive, then kiss goodbye quickly. ‘I forgot,’ she says, ‘a package came for Liam. I signed for it, I hope that’s okay. It’s in the hall. His name looked good on top of our address.’ She looks at him as if she is disappointed with him – as if a parcel arriving in someone else’s name is undeniably an act of love.
‘Thanks. You’d better get going.’