Jeremy had taken to telephoning me when it was not convenient for me to speak to him. I didn’t want to leave the receiver off the hook because he might then have reported the line as faulty or even come to the house, and either of those events would have meant intrusion. It was easy enough after the first few times just to ignore the ringing.
It was more important that I got adequate rest. I would arrive back at the cul-de-sac at daybreak and go to bed at once, though I couldn’t sleep straightaway. I would lie feverish in the way I remembered being as a child once or twice, in bed and missing school, and secretly happy to be so still and separate. After what seemed a long time, sounds would bob in on the surface of the day outside: motors running, children’s feet on gravel, doors opening and closing. My mind played out the scenes whose sounds I heard: my neighbour Gail shepherding her daughters Thomasina and Jessica from their mock-Tudor house into their estate car, big and small hands clicking seat belts, her slavering dogs, Bertie and Maisie, jumping in the back, leashes thrown in after them. Later would come the cruck of letterboxes in between the revving and halting of the post van at its usual two stopping points in the cul-de-sac.
Eventually, silence would come and embed itself. No, not silence. It was more like sound loitering in the shade while the day outside swelled with light, and the morning hours, burdened with heat, struggled to pass and expired, inevitably, in the end; then it would be afternoon, when the day seemed to sigh and slacken and give in to an indolent winding down towards evening. Languorous and minimal as a cat, I barely moved from hour to hour except, in my sleep, to yawn and stretch, as if testing some notion of elasticity in my lungs and limbs. I would sleep, and wake, and sleep, dreaming that I was not in my white nest of a bed but outside, under a warm sky. At intervals I would find myself half roused as if I had been dreaming in a hammock under white trees in a white garden somewhere, or lying on a pillowy bank of white grass like rough toweling, lulled by the prinking of distant radio tunes, a barking dog. Then I would lie very still in case I really was in a garden and the neighbours might be walking by, talking about me, and might see me and cast worried smiles and call out with questions. Only half awake, I would wonder if I had just missed the ringing of a telephone, or I might think that I could hear one but that it didn’t matter. It soothed me to lie still and not even try to get to it, for surely it was too far away.
Then I would let myself slip further away, deeper into my whiteness, and the whisper of the sheets as I drew them up around my ears and over my head was the same sighing as the wind in the pink blossom branches overhanging the narrow road in April, and the beat of my pulse on the pillow under my throat the same sad faraway sound as the drip of rain on the colourless flowers under the trees and on the messages of loss and regret, washing them all away.
Later a telephone or a doorbell would ring again, but not here, nor anywhere very near. All sounds came from the faraway “out there” of a warm cul-de-sac afternoon of opened windows and summery gardens and neighbour greeting neighbour: dreamy calling voices, the tap of claws as dogs trailed along the sun-soft tarmac of the road, the tick of a pram or a child’s tricycle wheeled by under the shade of the hedge. I had to burrow away from the sounds of innocuous, innocent lives. A telephone would go on ringing, in another room or maybe in another house, maybe the one against whose wall a pruning ladder had just struck with a soft, wooden tock that travelled across the way and flicked off the side of the house opposite, then bounced back, the sound mingling with the clip of shears slicing high up under the eaves and an exuberant fluster of clematis fronds falling in clouds of black and green against the brittle blue of a July sky. It was bitter and pleasant to lie immersed in whiteness with eyes closed against the sight of any more events beyond my window. The police were still hunting for a killer. There was so much more than glass, now, between me and what went on out there.
Eventually, of course, I had to answer the telephone. I told Jeremy I hadn’t got more than a few minutes because I was already late, and he asked me what I could be late for at nine o’clock in the evening. I was startled by this question. I hadn’t been awake long. As usual I had waited until it was dark so that when I got up I didn’t feel I was leaving my bed behind so much as entering another embrace. I stepped out of my bedroom not to confront a darkening house merely unlit, but to encounter the night. It breathed on me as I walked downstairs, and it floated behind, lifting the hairs on my neck, swirling around my feet, hanging on my clothes. It swept ahead and spread into the spaces before me. I had lit some candles for the pleasure of the counterpoising dots of gold in the blanketing darkness, just enough light by which to watch the night filling my empty rooms. The telephone had rung as I was putting down the box of matches.
Jeremy said he wanted to know if I was all right and then began to tell me why he knew I wasn’t. As I listened, I nipped out the flame of a candle and dabbed the escaping drop of wax between my thumb and forefinger until it was a cool, curved disk with brittle edges, like a fingernail detached from a corpse. I nibbled it while I waited. It tasted of oil and smoke.
“Are you there? Hello? This is the whole problem. This is pure emotional blackmail.”
I didn’t speak.
“All right. But since you have at least answered the telephone, perhaps you would tell me how you are?”
“I am here. I’m the same.”
“Are you?… I mean, have you…how are…have things…” He couldn’t flatten down the brisk interrogative breeze fluttering through his voice, lifting the edges of words and sniffing underneath. What things? “Are you coping with the heat, for instance? It’s terribly hot.”
“I told you, I’m the same.” As I said that an ache was rising in my chest and my heart began a kind of bumpy climb up my ribs. I tried to concentrate on how safe I was, to remember that I was alone in a dark room and that although his voice was present, he wasn’t.
“I know you’re shutting yourself away in the house,” he insisted. “Gail says she and Hector haven’t seen you for weeks, she thought you were away. She’s been trying to rouse you.”
I nipped out the flame of another candle. Smoke from the sooty wick trickled up my nose and I coughed. “I’m all right.”
“Look, I’m concerned. I think you may be at risk of going into a depression. I know just the person you should see; I think I should fix you up with an appointment.”
I swallowed the fragments of wax nail. “There’s no need for that.”
“But you are reacting very extremely to this. I’d like you to see him.”
“I don’t want to see anyone.”
“I think you should. I’m worried. In fact, I think I’ll come round this weekend.”
“Don’t. You can’t. The thing is-I’m going away.”
“Going away? Where? What for?”
“I haven’t decided. But definitely somewhere. Possibly for the rest of the summer. Maybe longer.”
“Well, maybe a holiday’s not such a bad idea. Actually it’s a good idea. France, I suppose? Make sure I have the details before you go, all right?”
“All right.”
“Good. Well done. A long break, how I envy you. By the way, the weather! Have you been remembering about the basil?”
“The basil?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t watered the pots? They’ll be bone dry! The parsley’s probably had it already!”
“You’re worried about the herbs?”
“Well, I don’t see why everything has to go to the dogs. I did a lot of work on those pots. You said you wanted to make pesto.”