“Yes, for that.”
“Fairfax can sleep on the sofa,” he said. “In fact, he is sleeping on the sofa already.” He didn’t wait for his coffee. She heard him slam the bathroom door and run the taps. She took a cup of coffee into the living room, tiptoeing.
He was right; Fairfax was asleep. He looked as if he had slipped, suddenly and silently, into another dimension; ten years had vanished, and his precision, his expertise; he looked vacant, vulnerable, as if all his life were to come. She put down the coffee cup on the floor, and went to find a blanket. When she came back Fairfax had not moved; she had never seen anyone sleep so profoundly, so totally. She covered him with the blanket. His body had a velvet, animal warmth, which perhaps it never possessed in Cumbernauld.
But the night would get colder. It was already two o’clock. She knelt by the sofa for a moment, her eyes closed, her forehead resting on the padded arm. A flurry of eidetic images rushed behind her eyelids: walls, staircases, open doors. “In a courtyard is a tree on which there are fruits whose color is red.” A grassy lawn, a sunny day, with a light breeze blowing; she cupped her hands, and the fruit fell into them. The image darkened; gave way to the meaningless flickers and streaks, the white noise of sleep, a static crackle from the universe of her neurons. She drifted for a second or two, in a starless waste. Then she woke, roused herself, and went slowly toward the bedroom, feeling her way with a hand on the wall, as if she had suddenly become blind.
2
Her own sleep was not total, not profound. She heard a noise, and thought it was the front door opening; knew it couldn’t be, turned her face into the pillow, slept again. A slow cinema unrolled itself: her soapstone tortoise, grown to life-size, grown to giant-size, and set as a public monument before the oily sea. Herself a tiny figure squinting into the sun, at the stony reptile’s feet; younger than her real self, years younger. And all her friends and family, all the people she had known, people she had not thought of in years, everyone gathering to be in the picture; then a shout, and a click, and the descent of darkness, a break in the film.
The shout had broken into her dreams. But it was further than her dreams, outside the purlieu of her imagination. It was not in her head, but in the room, in the passage, in the street. She sat up, scrabbled in the twisted sheets, fumbled for the alarm clock. Little green figures, glowing in a room still dark; it was only three o’clock. She thought she had slept for hours, but her head had hardly touched the pillow. She shuddered. She had become a connoisseur of insomnia, and three was the hour she could not love. The warm, healthy body runs at its lowest ebb then. Death certificates are prepared; night nurses usher the bereaved from public wards.
She leaned over her husband’s naked body. His skin felt cool and damp. “Get dressed. Something is wrong.” Her fingers skittered over the bedside table, where the soapstone tortoise used to bask and doze. She snapped on the bedside light, saw Andrew’s eyelids flicker; he yawned.
“Funny,” he said sleepily. “I heard a noise. Thought it was morning.”
“Get dressed.” She pulled a kaftan out of the wardrobe and dropped it over her head. She felt the burglar’s fingers upon it, as she felt them on all her clothes. She shook: with the sudden cold, with fatigue, with an expectation of disaster. “Did you remember to lock the front door?”
“No.” Andrew sat up. He stumbled out of bed. He reached for his jeans, started to pull them on, slow, fumbling, looking for his shoes. She was ready to go. But her nerve had failed. She was going to wait for him. “No one could come in,” Andrew said. “Unless they broke in.”
“They broke in before.”
Leaving the bedroom door open, she put on all the lights as she went: the passage, the empty bedroom. But there was no intruder. The living room was empty. Fairfax’s blanket, rucked up and cast aside, had slid to the floor. The front door was wide open.
Andrew stepped out into the hall. He turned on the lights to the stairwell; then they saw Fairfax. He clutched the banister at the foot of the stairs; he looked upward once, over his shoulder, and stumbled drunkenly toward them, half crouching, in silence. He gripped the doorframe, sliding from it as though his hands were slippery; he took a step over the threshold, and huddled against the wall. Andrew slammed the door. She took Fairfax’s arm. His whole weight threatened to collapse onto her shoulders, and through the thin cotton she noticed how cold his clutching fingers were. Andrew draped Fairfax’s other arm across his shoulder. Between them, they maneuvered him into the flat, and let him slide onto the sofa. He seemed only semiconscious, stupefied, in shock. Frances took his face in her hands. “What’s happened to you? Fairfax, where did you go?”
“Nothing happened,” he said. His head dropped. She felt unable to support its weight; she could not get him to look at her, to focus his attention even for a second. “Wanted air. Going to be sick.”
“That’s quite obvious,” Andrew said.
“No, no,” Fairfax insisted. “Was going to be sick. Went for a walk. Went for a bit of air. Couldn’t get out of the main door. Went up to the roof.”
He was deathly white, his skin clammy; hardly able to sit upright. “Did you meet someone?” Frances said.
“Who could he meet?” Andrew asked, yawning. “Look, Fran, don’t badger him, leave him alone. He just went walkabout, that’s all. Let him go back to sleep, he’ll sleep it off.”
“He’s in a state of shock. Look, Andrew, look at him.”
“He’s drunk, Fran. We should have been more careful, we’ve got used to this stuff, we don’t realize …” As if to prove Andrew right, Fairfax slid down a little onto the sofa. His head dropped back, his eyelids fluttered and closed. “He can’t keep awake,” Andrew said. His own fright—and he had been frightened, by the open door—had turned to sleepy truculence. “I have to be up at six, myself. I have to get into Turadup—”
“Oh, sod Turadup,” Frances said. “Fairfax, wake up, tell us.” He did open his eyes, for an instant; he looked at her warily, directly. She saw pain and fear. But he said nothing.
“He’s not really all that drunk,” she said. “Not anymore. He’s just made a decision, I think.” She turned away, distraught. “He’s not going to tell us.”
“Do you want me to go up to the roof?” Andrew asked.
“No. No, please, I don’t want you to do that.”
“Okay. So let’s sort it out in the morning.”
