In Another Country Read online

  They parted company; ate together, slept together, but were in separate circles. Almost at once, as though it were beyond his failing strength, he gave up pitying his wife and fell back down the decades into the couple of months of a summer in the Alps. Between thinking and muttering he went to and fro, up and down, never knew which he was in, and in her company, face to face over another meal or side by side on a walk to the post office, addressed her or himself. I wonder where you put that big medical dictionary. It wasn’t with the Cassell’s behind the jars. In the loft perhaps. The ladder to the loft was permanently down, encumbering the way into the little living room. A breath of cold hung over the opening. Or the warmth of their living space, being drawn up there, was converted into cold just above their heads. He was often up there, rooting around. In the mechanism of her love and duty she called him down when his meal was on the table. But also at nights he went up there and she heard him moving and muttering over the bedroom ceiling. Then she wept to herself, for the unfairness. Surely to God it wasn’t much to ask, that you get through to the end and looking back you don’t fill with horror and disappointment and hopeless wishful thinking? All she wanted was to be able to say it hasn’t been nothing, it hasn’t been a waste of time, the fifty years, that they amount to something, if not a child, a something made and grown between man and wife you could be proud of and nearly as substantial as a child. And now all this: him burrowing back though the layers, him rooting through all their accumulations, to get back where he wanted to be, in the time before she was. Once with a bitterness that twisted her mouth as if the question were vinegar she asked: How far gone was she? Six weeks, Mr. Mercer answered. We worked it out it would be about six weeks.

  The foetus at six weeks is a tiny thing hung in the mother like a creature in hibernation. The medical dictionary was in the loft in a very cramped place where the eaves came down behind a sort of false wall made of hardboard. But Mr. Mercer found it finally and in it a picture of the foetus at six weeks and sat there under the bare bulb like an adolescent staring at it. What struck him most when he thought about him and Katya was their heedlessness. That was the word that came to him. We were heedless. Because really if it was bad where we were leaving, which was Bavaria, it was not much better where we were heading, which was Italy, and up there in the snow, the minute we set off what did we do but go and get a baby. Heedless. For obviously we should have to come down again sooner or later, out of the sharp air, the flowers and the snow, and face up to our responsibilities in a bad world getting worse. But then again when he thought about it it didn’t seem heedless at all, because the thing he was most sure about, after all the years, was how sure they were all those years ago that what he wanted with her and she with him was to have a baby and go on living and living together forevermore. And you can’t be called heedless when you know as well as that what your purpose is in life and you act accordingly. And though they weren’t walking anywhere in particular, only to Italy and where in Italy it didn’t much matter, every day seemed to have enough point to it getting from wherever they were to wherever they ended up and finding somewhere nice to stay as Mr. and Mrs. with her brassy wedding ring. And days when they didn’t go anywhere but stayed in bed and took a little stroll in the vicinity when they felt like it seemed just as purposeful as days when they set off at four in the morning deadly serious. What did we do for food, I wonder, he asked himself up there in the roof space as though somebody else was asking him. What did we have for money between us to go on like that day after day, week after week? I can only suppose, he said to himself aloud or in his head, that God provided and kind people along the way. I have the feeling, he said, that somehow people liked us and somehow or other it gladdened them when we turned up. When Mr. Mercer thought of himself and her he thought of certain flowers and not the gentians that were beyond having any ideas about but a bare and rather frail violet flower that came up actually in the ice, as soon as there was the least gap of grass or earth and the water unfreezing around it and running fast, there you would see one or more of these frail flowers sprung up. Then, and more so now, he wanted to call them, these flowers, brave: but a flower was a flower and neither brave nor cowardly nor anything else, yet the word brave came to mind when he thought of that quick seizing of a chance to spring up the minute the ice opened even only a little. And that was how he thought of Katya and himself after all that time with Hitler where they’d come from and Mussolini where they were going to, up there wandering around and making a baby the minute they turned their backs on civilization.

  Tuesday again. Where’s the trip today then? Mr. Mercer asked. It seemed to Mrs. Mercer he had aged ten years in a week if that were possible for a man his age already. The Horseshoe Pass, she said brightly, and the Swallow Falls, to see some scenery. You’ll enjoy that, he said.

  The minute the door closed after her he put his boots on that were not the boots but like them because he had always bought the same and packed a rucksack with the maps and some provisions for the journey. The maps were the very ones, in Gothic script with a pair of hikers on the cover in the costume of that time and place. He had found them in the loft with the photographs that he had against his heart now in a wallet with the letter to prove he had a right to see her in the ice if anyone in authority challenged him. When he was ready with a hat and stick and money from the place he hid his in under one of the joists, he wrote a message to leave on the table for Mrs. Mercer when she came home from her trip. Dear Kate, he wrote, I am sorry about the tea again but trust you will understand that I have to go and see her as the next of kin and am sure it will all be back to normal here with you and me after that. PS I’ve made another appointment for a week on Monday. I think I’ll ask him for something a bit stronger to quieten me down.

  Where the road drops away from among the same houses Mr. Mercer paused for a moment over the view, over the estuary, over the river widening and giving itself up into the endless sea. A sunny light was on that place where sweet and salt meet and the salt takes all the river in, all the streams of all the hills all along the way and feels not a bit of difference but continues vast and flat and through and through undrinkable. Kitted up to leave with money and some biscuits for the journey Mr. Mercer brought his mind to bear on a six-week baby beginning in a girl of twenty in the ice now after sixty years uncovered because the glacier had lost its snow and discovered in there, fresh. The kindly woman whose house he was standing outside must have watched him for a good ten minutes from her front-room window before she came out worried. And tried her best then, shaking him gently, speaking close up into his absent face, to get through to what was still alive in him in there behind his glasses and the glaze of tears.

  The Cave

  Lou’s sister phoned. Was she still seeing her funny chap? Lately he was all Maya asked about. Indeed, she had begun to preach, which Lou rather resented. But since she had no one else to discuss him—or it, the whole business—with, often she weakened and confessed. Yes, she said, I’m seeing him next week as a matter of fact. And what will it be this time? Maya asked. A longboat to the Arctic Circle? Lying on deck under the Aurora Borealis? Lou said it wouldn’t be anything so idle but what it would be she didn’t know. She never knew. That was what annoyed Maya. She said it was demeaning, always waiting for surprises, like a little girl, always waiting for the next treat. But she wasn’t a little girl, she was a grown woman, time running out etc., etc. Life’s not all treats, you know. At which point Lou asked after the children. How was Chloë’s piano? Did William like his new school? Was she, Maya, still doing all the fetching and carrying? How was Henry? Very busy? Was she seeing anyone else? As a matter of fact I am, said Maya. Time’s running out, I do want a life of my own. And then she reverted, in what sounded like real concern, to her sister, her life, her infrequent meetings with the man she, Maya, thought very dubious. All I mean is, does he mean it? Mean what? When he takes you off doing these extraordinary things, is he serious? He’s v
ery serious, said Lou. Or rather, it’s serious. It is very serious. But I suppose you mean does he love me, will he marry me, will we buy a house, will he have children with me, that sort of thing? You love him, that’s obvious, said Maya, and if he doesn’t love you he shouldn’t keep doing things with you that make you love him more. Obvious? Keep doing? More? Lou got tangled up and stopped listening. She wondered did men ever talk about women like that, hour after hour, about their women. She couldn’t imagine that they did. She supposed some of them boasted. She couldn’t imagine Owen talking to another man about her and boasting. For one thing, what did he have to boast about, in that sense? Maya, she said, coming back in, I sometimes think we’re no better off than Jane Austen’s women, and men aren’t better off either, the way you talk. They mustn’t do anything that might arouse in us expectations they cannot or will not fulfill. And if they do, they are bad men and we are fools. I only mean you should find out if he’s serious, Maya said. Or what else is he after? Power? You worry me, Lou. You are on your own too much.

  Lou was right to say that a longboat under the Aurora Borealis would not have been Owen’s thing. Mostly when he wrote to suggest they might meet it was to do something he described as his job, or his job, ‘sort of’. For example, during a bad fire on the moors he asked, the minute she arrived, would she like to climb up with him and see the damage? It was still burning when they got there and the usual roads had been closed by the police; but he knew a way round, from upwind, luckily enough, and they followed the fire as it cropped its way through the heather. Funny having residual flames about your ankles and kicking through hot ash. One discovery pleased him particularly. He had come across a poem about a hill fire in which the fire was described as advancing over all but ‘leaving springs in hoofmarks’. In Lou’s opinion, Owen did not give enough credence to poetry; but when they found several such damp survivals he had to concede that, for once, a poem told the truth.

  Anyway, a week after Maya’s phone call, there they were, Lou Johnson and Owen Shepperd, in the limestone country and it was not going well. Miserably she trailed along behind him like a child in disgrace not knowing why, sorrowful and furious at the rules she did not understand but hated and despised anyway, whether she understood or not. Why had he asked her? Why had she been fool enough to come? They were trailing along the busy street of a small town and she supposed it must be back to the railway station he was leading her and there, courteous and cold, he would see her on to a train and that would be that. Well so be it. Still she was miserable.

  Then suddenly he halted, turned to her and said, Forget all that. Here’s this. And he took her first by the arm then very firmly by the hand and stepped with her off the busy street into an alleyway between two ordinary shops. The way was not surfaced like a modern street but roughly cobbled and before long not even that, the limestone itself was underfoot and the alley had become a track, rising. So the street had a very thin border, only one row of shops, and you could step between them, if you knew the gap, into this! Owen said nothing, he seemed to be concentrating. He had on his face the expression of a man concentrating hard to get something right, to make something come true under his feet and before his eyes. But he held her hand tightly as though that should be proof enough and she shouldn’t worry he might rather be there concentrating alone. They went on in silence, the way climbed, soon it was more a deserted stream bed than a path, they climbed under hazels and alders, in a mossy light, and the noise of the town quietened behind them and below. The town continued in her consciousness for a while, lingering as a murmur at the back of her mind, then she forgot it. The first words he said were, The water’s just underneath.

  Stepping off a public street into a quite different space and time was something Owen had done with Lou before. Once it was in the spa town, in late summer. He had written and suggested they meet, she agreed, they met, they were walking along, it was going well between them, in a friendly sort of way. He seemed glad of the occasion, sure of it, and quite suddenly guided her off the street through a broken door (it wouldn’t open, they squeezed) into a long walled garden. The place astonished her. Only later, not having heard from him for weeks, did she again rather resent his ability to astonish her. Whenever Owen fell out of her favour she declared him, almost in her sister’s voice, to be playing a very calculated game with her, the chief interest of which, from his point of view, was power. But the garden did astonish her. It belonged to a very big house whose many eyes and mouths were shut with steel against the vandals. Owen’s interest lay at the far end, in the apple orchard. Scrumping, he said. Before the developers grub them up. And out of his rucksack he took several plastic bags and handed Lou a couple. The trees had been neglected, they wore mistletoe, moss and lichen on many dead branches as the marks of it; but nevertheless, keeping their side of the bargain, they had cropped. A few of each sort, if you wouldn’t mind, Owen said. The old lady collected and some you can’t find any more. Quietly they moved through the apple light plucking fruit that was shining pearl and shades of red and gold and underwater green. Owen could name some, but had a friend, he said, who would identify the rest and grow their progeny from pips. When he took out his notebook and became very serious, Lou drifted back to where the wreckage of a kitchen garden began and sat there, on the orchard frontier, under the last tree, eating an apple whose name perhaps only Owen’s friend would know. The flesh and juice and sweetness without a name gave her a thoughtful pleasure that had an undertow of sadness, in full view of the stopped and blinded house.

  And now, climbing the stream bed, Lou acknowledged that he must once again have schemed for an effect. Surely he knew very well where the particular gap was between the shops. But because of the bad mood and her trailing behind him dejectedly they might have forfeited the chance, their being in the stream bed after all was a mercy, and when he said that the water was ‘just underneath’ she felt a rush of affection for him and gratitude that he had wrenched himself out of his bad humour and rescued the good opportunity for them both.

  The climb steepened. Owen went ahead. Then the course of the stream, the dampness, its covering of trees, its softening and adornment by moss and pennywort and fern, gave out and they had an open space before them and lapwings flapping up raggedly into a blue sky. Late afternoon. Some distance off was a grey-white scar. It’s there, he said. What it was, Lou did not ask. I was sixteen when I came here last, he said, on my own. I doubted I would find the place again. I thought the gap would be filled in years ago. His happiness touched her. And the lapwing still! That’s a blessing, they are so diminished nowadays. How I love limestone!

  Owen lived on the gritstone, which has its own character and beauties. And—as he had told Lou more than once—he was content that the limestone should be some way off, within walking distance but still a sensible journey. It was a zone he could set off for and come into, a country of rock that changed from almost black through grey to white under the fleeting weather. He loved the shallows of water on the green grass in the sunshine after rain; the vanishings of water, its passage and collecting underground, its distant reappearances. All that and more, he said. Much more. And not that I don’t love where I live.

  Lou had gone there once, to Owen’s house on the gritstone, uninvited, or at least without warning him. He had often said to her, Call in if you’re ever that way, so one day she did, not having heard from him for weeks and without pretending that she had any other business in his neighbourhood. See how he pulls you, Maya said. But then she added, Your voice is funny. Is it bad again? Yes, said Lou it is very bad again. I thought the walk might get me out of it. So she bought the necessary map, drove for a couple of hours, left the car ten miles off, and walked. She did not expect him to be at home and was not even sure, the closer she got, that she really hoped he would be. Mile by mile the walk had inspirited her lungs, her voice came up, she tested it by singing. The walking itself—the movement, the attention—was so beautifully effective
she began to believe she did not need him to be the object of it and, almost arrived, she had half a mind to turn and retrace her steps.

  The village surprised her. It was intricately built up one side, the south-facing, of a narrow valley, the houses were fitted along terraces and access from level to level was by steep alleys and steps. Having no hope of finding his house, she asked at the shop, which was down below by the bridge. The woman directed her, and two or three gossipers looked on and smiled. It occurred to her that she had no real idea how Owen lived, not even whether he lived alone; but lodged now in the talk of the village she felt she had no option but to see her journey through. Besides, she was tired. The directions were inadequate, two levels up she had to ask again. A man who had been watching her pointed out the house, and soon she stood there in the garden of it, entering by the back gate not the front, and saw him in the window at a plain table, writing. For perhaps half a minute Lou had the advantage and considered him. She saw again—she had seen it often—how when he concentrated he seemed to need nobody and nothing but what he had in mind. He seemed in a circle of his own, and she stood outside, viewing him through the glass, banished. But then, not enjoying her advantage, she made a small movement of her hand so that he looked up, saw her, and she saw him not just surprised but at a loss, bewildered, fearful, as though appearing suddenly in his garden in the sunlight she was a phenomenon against which he was quite defenceless. It shook her to see him like that, and deeply confused her feelings.