They went back to their room after dinner and made love. This was nice, if a little self-conscious and laden with implicit self-congratulation. They’d still got it, still knew how to have a good time. That much was clear.
In the middle of the night David awoke. Amanda was sound asleep beside him, and remained so for the two hours he spent lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. This time he’d brought something more back with him than an atmosphere. An image of long grasses near somewhere watery. Of somewhere not close, but not far away.
A sense that this was not the beginning of something after all.
By the second week of April David was waking almost once a night to find himself lying in a strange bed. Familiarity closed in rapidly, but for a moment there was a sense of inexplicability, like moving on from the missing (4) to the comfort of the present (5). He could remember things about the dreams now. Very small things. The long grasses, often, though sometimes they seemed more like reeds. The sense of water: not moving fast, not a river or stream, but present nonetheless.
Finally, a building, or the remains of one.
He knew it was a building, and that it was ruined, though in the dream his point of view was too close up to make out anything more than lichened stone and clouded blue sky above. As if he was crouched down low, and glancing up.
That morning Amanda look at him over her cup of mint tea. “Where did all those olives go?”
“I ate them,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you sleeping okay?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You don’t seem to be. You look tired. And sometimes you thrash about The other night I thought I heard you say ‘Goodbye, love’ in your sleep.”
“‘Goodbye, love’? That doesn’t sound like me.”
“Quite.”
David shrugged. He knew that he should tell her about what was happening. He hated films in which a character keeps secrets from the very people or person who should be on his side: a source of cheap tension that had more to do with padding the plot than representing real life. But he didn’t tell her, all the same. It didn’t seem relevant. Or she didn’t, perhaps.
He went to work, and came home, and went to work again. He went to the gym, as usuaclass="underline" moving weights nowhere, running the same rolling yard, strutting and fretting his half-hour on the elliptical trainer. Artful Bodgers won more business, and he gave everyone a little bonus. He considered taking over one of their suppliers, then shelved the decision for another day. He came home, he went to work again. He dreamed of the building once more, this time from a little further away. The fact that it was ruined was clearly apparent. And that it was somewhere in England. There was nothing about it that proved that. David simply knew it.
“You spoke in your sleep again,” Amanda said, at another breakfast. “You said, ‘I can’t hear what you’re saying.’“
He looked at her. “But what does that mean?”
She turned a page in this morning’s manuscript. “You tell me,” she said. “God, this novel’s shite.”
He started visiting bookstores in his lunch breaks, and stopping off at Borders on his way home from work. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, so he just browsed. He looked in the travel sections (domestic); he looked at books on the English countryside. Nothing seemed to help. He didn’t have enough to work with, and there was a sense, when he looked at pictures, that he shouldn’t need to. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a puzzle. It wasn’t supposed to be hard.
In the last week of April, now only a week from his birthday, Amanda sometimes worked in her study with her door shut. He knew that she would be wrapping little presents for him. David knew that they would be nice. He had no desire to know what they were yet. He liked surprises. They came along seldom enough.
Amanda surprised him in another way, before the day. She asked if he was going to visit his mother. He realized both that he should, and that he should do it on the day itself. Without her, after all, there wouldn’t be forty years to mark. He called her, and arranged it. She said she’d put on a little lunch.
He was dreaming now, almost constantly, but through a veil. He felt sick some mornings, as if he had failed to digest something. Nothing he looked at seemed to be what he should be seeing. None of his lists had anything on them except numerals in brackets.
He finally mentioned this to Amanda. She kissed him, and put her arms around him. She was his wife. She understood, or thought she did.
David got up at the usual time on the fourth of May, though he had taken the day off work. He had breakfast in bed, then came down in a dressing gown to a kitchen table on which his presents had been laid. They were all very nice, and Amanda left for work fifteen minutes later than usual. She sat with him, and had an extra cup of tea, and they smiled and laughed.
After she’d gone he showered and dressed and then went out and got in his car. He forged a route out of London and onto the M1l, taking it up past Cambridge and into the countryside. He tried to find something on the radio to listen to, some CD in the glove compartment, but none of them sounded right. He could remember buying them, but none of them seemed to be his.
He reached Willingham a little before midday, on time. His mother was standing at the door to her house, steel-haired, compact and smiling. Once the land on which she stood had been part of a farm, a larger holding belonging to one of her ancestors. Like everything else, it had been made smaller by time.
His mother had made sandwiches and cake. While she laid them out he wandered around the house where he had grown up, trying to remember how long it had been since he’d visited. A couple of years, certainly. She occasionally made it down to London, and that tended to be where they met. Tea at the Ritz, sometimes. An overnight or two in the house he owned with Amanda, tucked up safe in the spare bed. Not so very often, for the person who had been his mother, but that tended to be the way it went. You moved further from the start, and towards something else: eyes turned always forward, the past something you only remembered once in a while, generally through something heard. Things weren’t about beginnings any more. They were about persistence, and endings, for the most part. Persistence, above all.
He found himself drawn to one room in particular. His parents’ old room; his mother’s still. He stood in the centre, unsure of what he was doing there. He looked up at the ceiling. Off-white, as it always had been. If you allowed your eyes to fall out of focus then the imperfections blurred away, and its colour became all you could see.
His mother’s voice floated upstairs.
After lunch he asked her about her bedroom. Had something changed? She said no. Nothing had changed for her in several years.