The fire was gone. Every piece of wood had become a little boat and sailed away. There remained only a shallow puddle. I took a rough inventory. The moss which I had foolishly left open to the elements had vanished. I could not see the flint. The rain had carried away an entire pack of food. I took the notebook from inside my shirt and opened it. The sodden margins were soaked and in places the paper had begun to disintegrate but I had taken the precaution of writing in pencil so no ink had run and for this I was grateful.
Eventually the sun came out. The temperature rose and steam began to rise from the stretched canvas and the shallower puddles. I drank a little water. I put a handful of nuts into my mouth and chewed them to a paste so that they could pass easily down my constricted throat. I struggled out of my clothes and sat naked on the warming rock. Behind me rose the great opening of the cave. On every other side green jungle ran seamlessly to a misty horizon.
I opened the notebook and waited for the pages to become dry. Then I took up my pencil and began.
Now I can write no more. I have been blessed with a final day of brilliant sunshine. For that I am thankful. I hope I have used it well.
The night is coming.
I wish that this were a happier ending.
THE WEIR
He pops the catch and lifts the rusty boot. Quivering with excitement the dogs burst from the back of the car, squirm under the lowest bar of the fence and bolt across the field in great arcing bounds. Leo and Fran, big chocolate-and-white pointers. He drops the chewed and ragged tennis ball into one jacket pocket, the coiled leather leads into the other, grabs the tatty, gripless tennis racket and slams the boot. He beeps the lock and climbs the stile.
Grass stretches into the distance. Twenty acres. There are no sheep this year so half a million buttercups hover just above the ground. He can smell the May blossom, the same chemicals in semen and corpses so he read the other day. Wytham Woods rise beyond the meadow to his left. Up there among the trees is the Singing Way, pilgrims breaking into song as they passed My Lady’s Seat and looked across the silver flood of Port Meadow to the inns and spires of the city. One of those spring days that seem warm and cold at the same time. Enough blue to make a pair of sailor’s trousers. Cirrus clouds overhead. Ice crystals at 16,000 feet. A pied wagtail lands briefly on the path in front of him then hops back into the air and is carried away.
Leo races towards him and skids to a halt with Fran in pursuit. He barks and half prostrates himself, forelegs flat on the ground, hindquarters in the air. Throw the ball throw the ball throw the ball. He lobs it into the air, whacks it hard and both dogs launch themselves backwards, twisting in mid-air so that they land on all fours then run like racehorses in old paintings, the ball still up there, sliding round that big curve.
To his right the river is full from last week’s downpour, the surface purling midstream as the water sorts itself out below the weir. A buzzard circles above the scrubby wasteland on the far side. He treads carefully over the twisty poles of the cattle grid and feels, as he always does at this precise point, that he has crossed an invisible boundary which marks the limit of the city’s reach.
It’s now seven weeks since Maria walked out and he’s pleased at how well he’s coping. The dogs help, dragging him out on long walks like this. Having the time of their lives, probably. Plus the house is never empty. Knowing they’re downstairs when he wakes in the night and finds himself alone. He’s learning to cook for himself after twenty-six years: macaroni cheese; shepherd’s pie…And reading his way through the tower of books which have been glaring at him from the shelf above the TV for God knows how long: John Grisham, Philip Pullman, the one set in Afghanistan the author of which he can never remember…
Fran returns with the ball in her mouth. They do a little dance of dodge and feint. She drops it, he picks it up and whacks it away again.
If there are rough patches, that’s to be expected. Change gets harder, just as the body becomes less flexible. Today for example. The nagging feeling that his marriage is only the latest thing which has slipped away. The world shifting too fast in ways he doesn’t understand, values he’d grown up with become vaguely comic: being a gentleman; respecting authority; privacy; stoicism; reticence. When did holding a door open for a woman become an insult? Teenagers watching pornography on their phones.
He wonders if it all comes down to Timothy, the friction which ended the marriage, this longing for things to be as they were. Or whether, when you have a ready-made answer like that, you use it lazily for every question. The fact that it might be malicious is what makes it hardest to handle, their son wanting them to suffer. Three years without a postcard, an email, a phone call. The anger he felt when Maria said it would be better if he were dead. Her own child. He has dreams of a blurred postmark. Lhasa? Marrakesh? Stepping off the plane into sauna shimmer. Hostels, cafés, a local police chief, feet on the desk under a lazy ceiling fan. The photograph in his pocket getting more dog-eared and less readable by the day, the hope that his son is somewhere nearby, a needle in his arm, maybe, some sign that this was not his choice.
Fran returns yet again with the tennis ball. Leo is busy chasing something. So long as he doesn’t bring it back bloody and struggling. He hits the ball into the air. The satisfying boink of the taut strings, the sheer distance of it.
She isn’t with someone else, thank God. Unless she’s hiding it. Which wouldn’t be hard, him being blind to so many things.
There is movement at the edge of his field of vision. Someone is making their way along the gantry of the weir that runs between the farmland and the island. The lock-keeper, presumably, or someone from the Environment Agency. But when they turn he sees a bright red rucksack. It is a woman. She must have lost her way because as far as he knows you can only reach the weir via the unmetalled track that descends from the hard shoulder of the ring road. Black leggings, denim skirt, big tartan shirt, long straight blonde hair. Twenty, maybe twenty-five. She seems unsure of her footing and is supporting herself by holding on to the metal uprights and the rusted valves. It is not a good place to be unsteady on your feet.
Again Fran blocks the path in front of him, tail up, head down, panting, tennis ball between her paws.
“Not now.”
She whimpers. Please please. He picks it up, wallops it away and starts walking upriver towards the lock. Beneath the woman’s feet the whole river is being forced through a single open gate, a fat silver spout curving into the churn of surf. The roar could be a house on fire. She comes to a halt in the very centre of the weir. She is clearly in some kind of trouble. Sudden dizziness, maybe, or that phobia people get on bridges. He can imagine standing there and looking down and being spooked by that torrent. She needs help. He wants to call out to her, reassure her that he will be with her in a few minutes, but there is no way she will be able to hear him at this distance and over that noise. He starts to run. If he remembers correctly there is only a chain to stop pedestrians crossing the lock. Presumably there is some kind of path through the trees. It will take him, what, two or three minutes?
Then he turns and sees her let go of the supports. She stands facing downriver and he realises that she is planning to jump. Understands, too, why she was staggering, because why else would you wear a rucksack if you were planning to do something like that? He feels sick at the thought. “No!” He waves his arms, but she does not turn her head.